


Swansong

by pprfaith



Category: Twilight Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe, Blood, Canon Divergence, Character Study, F/M, Gifted Bella, Gore, Inaccurate Historical Descriptions, Murder, Not Cullen friendly, Post-New Moon, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychic Abilities, Roadtrip, Self-Discovery, Vampire Western, Vampires with PTSD, Violence, meandering prose, old story, upload - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-05
Updated: 2018-10-05
Packaged: 2019-07-25 13:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 28,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16198181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: She's Swan and she's just passing through, accumulation of all you never knew.





	1. Roads

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [bonding scene in pastels](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13022073) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith). 



> Originally posted in 2010, which I call my 'earliest readable works phase', ie it's not really polished, but it's a decent read. It's still fairly popular on ff.net, so I guess it is, at least. Enjoy.

.

**Roads**

.

After they find her in the woods, she sleeps. 

Only, not really. She lies in bed, curled up tightly, like a butterfly in a cocoon, trying to hold it all in, to stop her guts from spilling all over the place, to keep her insides from falling out onto the floor, like the tangled, squirming mess they are. But her eyes remain open, fixed on the wall. It’s dark and blank and soothing and it reminds her of… of so many things.

Good things.

Those hurt the most. 

Charlie is worried. She knows that. Her sits with her every free minute and tries to make sure Jacob is there when he has to go to work. He talks to her, begs with her, pleads for her to wake up. 

She’s not sleeping. 

She’s just not ready yet. She doesn’t know what to do. She needs… she needs a little time.

But Charlie worries.

He leaves her be for a week, maybe two before he stops asking and starts commanding. He yells and she flinches because it’s so loud. She’s never liked loud and it’s only gotten worse in the company of the cold ones, without heartbeat, without breath. They barely ever made a sound and Edward was the quietest of them all.

She flinches.

And Charlie yells, “Damn it, Bells, I know you’re sad because that bastard left you, but you’ve got your whole life in front of you! There’s something out there for you, someone who actually deserves you! The whole damn world’s waiting for you! So stop moping!”

He’s scared for her. Terribly scared. She blinks at his heaving frame, blinks again. Something waiting?

Yes.

Yes, that sounds right. Something waiting. She just has to find it.

She moves.

.

She goes back to school and she talks to Angela and Ben and lets Jessica and Mike look at her funny. She aces her classes and sometimes lets Jake drag her out to the beach or the movies.

She eats, breathes and sleeps and spends every moment in between looking. Waiting. For that thing that’s coming for her. 

She makes out with three different boys under the bleachers and lets Jake touch her boobs once before excusing herself with a smile he doesn’t buy. 

It doesn’t feel right. 

Charlie asks her once what made her come out of her funk and she hums low, at the back of her throat, and says, “Something’s waiting for me, right?”

She makes it a question but she already knows the answer. 

He nods. “Right.”

.

She doesn’t count the days since they left because it doesn’t feel right. It feels like she should be counting down to zero, counting _toward_ something. Not away. Something’s waiting for her.

The certainty of that statement rises with every repetition and her own low, thoughtful hum echoes in her head, a vibration that agrees with her. 

So she doesn’t count. Months pass on their own, seasons come and go and she waits. She gets really good at waiting.

.

One day, she has no idea how long it’s been, she stands at the top of the highest cliff in the rez, staring down at the curling, swirling sea below. 

The hum at the back of her mind grows louder, deeper. Warningwarningwarning. Down that cliff is the wrong way. 

She turns back towards the steep path and makes her way to Billy’s place, where she has hot chocolate and sits on the porch with Jake. 

“Why didn’t you?” he asks after she tells him that she wanted to jump so badly. 

“It was the wrong direction,” she answers and he shakes his head.

“Bells, don’t get me wrong, I love ya, but sometimes I think that bloodsucker seriously screwed up something in your head.”

She shakes her head. Jake thinks she’s got a few loose screws because she sits still a lot and says things that make her sound like the after party special in the loony bin, but it wasn’t Edward that put the crazy in her head. She thinks it’s always been there. 

It just broke loose when he left, like a bad case of the rash. Mental rash. She smiles into her mug secretively and Jake clucks his tongue and shakes his head some more. 

As an afterthought she adds, “I love you, too.”

.

Graduation comes and goes and she hasn’t applied to a single college. She wants to travel, she tells Charlie. She needs to find the right direction.

“What for?”

She shrugs and tugs on the hem of her shirt. “You said there’s something out there for me. I have to find it, Dad.”

He doesn’t like the idea of his only daughter giving up her education in favor of traveling around the country, looking for something so elusive it doesn’t even have a name, isn’t so much as an idea. But it’s her life and she thinks he can see the fire in her eyes. For the first time since she curled up in the woods, she’s found something to fight for. 

So he sighs and runs a hand over his head, giving in. But there are rules.

She calls at least once a week. He always wants to know where she is. She has to swear, up and down, that she’ll call if she needs help, no matter how small and she’s not allowed to leave the country without talking to him first. She needs to work, not waste her youth and she needs to give up her truck and get a more reliable car. She promises all those things and gets access to her college funds in return.

She packs a duffel and a back pack, clothes, her laptop, her ipod, a few books she can’t possibly be without. The hum is back again, bouncing around her head like a trapped bee. 

This is the right direction, she thinks and smiles quietly as Fork shrinks in the rear view mirror of her new-old jetta. 

.

She makes it to Seattle and even though it’s only hours away from Forks, it’s a different world. Here there is no Charlie to offer unwavering support, no Jake to hug her close and call her crazy, no wolves to protect her. Here she’s a teenage girl without a past or future, looking for something she can’t name. 

It feels amazing. 

She finds a job in a café and it’s good enough for her. She lives in a motel for two weeks before finding a room she can afford. Her books go on the shelf above the bed, her clothes in the dresser, her toothbrush into the tiny bathroom.

She works the morning shift and hates the uniform but gets good tips because she’s about twenty years younger than all the other waitresses there, who all take a shine to her. It’s a bit like having half a dozen stern mothers all of a sudden and it gets overwhelming for the girl who didn’t even have one mother growing up. Let’s face it, she loves Rene, but the woman has always been more of an accident prone younger sibling than a mother. 

But these women, with their rouged cheeks and apple-pink, aging lips, they call her ‘sweetie’ and make sure to take over her tables when someone gets ideas in their head and their hand on her ass. 

They all tell her she should sign up for classes, should make something of herself. Something that won’t have her ending up right where they are, old, wasted and poor. She smiles at them and tells them that this is only one step of a journey. They ask if she wants to be a star and she shakes her head and changes the subject.

.

Calls with Rene become seriously awkward. 

Rene is the last person on Earth who would ever begrudge her the crazy urge to throw away her future in order to search for some nameless thing. But she keeps asking for her baby girl to come to her, visit her, maybe tour with her and Phil for a while. Search together. 

But she can’t. Charlie let her go, unhappy but willing. Rene wants to cling, to hold on, and she needs to fly right now.

.

The guy in the apartment next to hers intentionally forgets to buy onions every time he goes grocery shopping, just so he can come over and borrow one from her. She’s pretty sure he has a whole bucket full of onions rotting in his kitchen by now, but she never calls him on it.

He has stars in his eyes when he looks at her and she feels old and jaded because she looked like that at someone, once upon a time. And she thought it was the best feeling in the world, thought it would last forever. 

So she smiles a lot and lets him have his onions. 

.

She’s been in Seattle for almost six months when she walks down the street and passes a travel agency with a picture of the Grand Canyon in the window. She stops, head cocked to one side, studying the picture. 

The humming returns.

She quits the next day, packs her things, gives her starry-eyed neighbor the entire contents of her small kitchen along with a chaste kiss on the cheek and then leaves the city behind without another thought, singing along to the sound of a million bees in her mind. 

.

She does the sky walk, sends Jake a post card and calls Charlie just to tell him that she’s happy. He laughs with her as the wind whips around her and the earth splits in front of her and she thinks this is okay.

The humming fades to almost nothing and she finds a job in one of the nearby tourist traps and a room above a Laundromat. The uniforms are better this time and the rent is cheaper and during her second months there, Jake comes to visit. 

He wants to see the hole in the ground he says and she shows him. They laugh a lot and get drunk illegally and somehow they end up kissing because she hasn’t kissed anyone in almost a year and Jake still hasn’t imprinted on anyone and what does it matter? 

He rolls away from her eventually and asks, “Have you found what you’re looking for, yet?”

She runs a finger over his temple and cheekbone, trailing it down to his chin, tapping it once. “No,” she tells him.

.

Four months and the humming starts again, refusing to stop until she’s on the highway, the nose of her jetta turned east. 

.

Grand Junction sounds like just the place for a girl passing through, and this time, she decides against a diner and gets herself a job in a bookstore instead. She has yet to touch her college fund and Charlie is prouder of her for that than he probably should be. 

She finds a place to stay with a coworker who’s looking for a roomie while her sister is touring Europe for six months. That suits her just fine and she moves in, books, clothes, toothbrush and settles into a nice routine with Annie, the coworker. 

They do things like watch movies together and have girl talk, something that she’s never really done before. Not with someone she saw as her equal anyway. Annie is shocked to hear she’s a virgin and teases her for ‘saving herself’. She wants to protest, but she’s not really sure she can. She _is_ saving herself. For something. Whatever that may be.

They get into mock fights while resorting the romance section after hours and they bake cookies together after midnight just because they feel like it. 

A few months in, a couple with blood red eyes comes into the store. They looks a bit run down and Annie keeps a skeptic eye on them, but they do nothing out of the ordinary. He heads straight for the history section, while she picks up a few maps and travel guides. They converge on one of the reading couches and she lingers close to them, fumbling around the New Age shelf. 

Annie comes over eventually and asks, “Do you know them?”

The two of them stiffen on their couch and she shakes her head no. “Alright. What’s got you acting all stalker then?”

“Nothing,” she says and flees for the safety of cooking and baking. She’s happily fiddling with _101 Muffin Recipes_ when they rise to leave.

She puts down the books she was stacking, wipes her hands on her jeans and steps right into their path as they head for the exit. They both stiffen, the female slipping behind the male, who crouches lightly. They’re on edge and she’s playing with fire. Red eyes. Red eyes.

“Don’t go south,” she says.

“What?”

“Don’t go south. Head north. You’ll find who you’re looking for there.”

Eyes narrow and she can already feel her blood trickling away. Firefirefire. But she can’t walk away. Not now. Not ever. People walk away from her, not the other way round.

“And who would we be looking for, little girl?” the male wants to know, his accent strange and lilting. Beautiful. They are all so beautiful. 

“I don’t know,” she admits with a shrug. “Just go north.”

She uses their confusion to slip away, past Annie, toward the back where she leans against the wall and closes her eyes, breathing deeply. 

Footsteps. “What the hell, roomy?”

She shrugs. 

“I thought you didn’t know them.”

“I don’t,” she says and regrets that things will be awkward now.

.

She has a theory. 

About the screws that a certain family’s leaving shook loose in her head. She thinks that maybe she’s a bit psychic. She thinks that all vampires with gifts are really just psychics 2.0. 

They are the butterflies to her caterpillar. 

Alice and Edward and Jasper and all the others. The most obvious symptom being Alice’s visions, even before she was turned. But she bets that both Edward and Jasper sometimes looked at people, just looked, and knew what they thought, what they felt. 

Just like she looks at people and _knows_. Two years from now, Annie’s gonna have a baby. Jake’s imprint’s name will be Leila, Charlie is dating Sue Clearwater, Edward left because he was scared and the man in the biology section knows his wife is cheating on him but can’t stand the idea of losing her.

So yeah. She’s pretty sure she’ll make a very gifted vampire one day.

.

They come back the same day Annie meets the father of her future child and spends the rest of the day gushing about him. 

It’s a rainy day and they enter the store soundlessly, dripping water on the dark blue carpet. It’s late and they’re closed already, but what vampire has ever been stopped by a locked door?

Annie sees them first and freezes, panic rattling through her skull. “We mean no harm,” the male says, standing in front of the female, like before. But this time there’s another one, a black male with eyes that are fire-engine red. The female holds tightly onto his arm, whispering to him constantly, calming him down.

Newborn. 

The male turns to her and asks, “How did you know?”

She shrugs. “I just did. It’s not a big deal.”

He shakes his head. “No. We have found a new member for our family. That is indeed a big deal. We owe you thanks…”

She hesitates only a moment before answering, “Swan.”

She finds it ironic, that she’s named after an animal whose song only turns beautiful in the throes of death. It fits her, the girl in love with death and the dead. It fits her so very well. 

Nomen est omen.

He nods. “Swan. Carver, Annabelle and Jordan,” he declares, pointing at himself and his companions in turn. “Remember those names for we are in your debt.”

He bows and is gone, taking the other two with him. She looks at Annie, who is clutching both hands to her heart, panting like she just ran a mile. Time to move on, she thinks. 

The bees agree.

.

She writes Rene post cards from everywhere she goes, the text always the same. I love, you miss you, still searching. 

.

Two days later her car breaks down just beyond Colorado Springs and she calls Charlie at work to inform him that her ‘more reliable’ car is a piece of shit and she would really like her old truck back right about now.

He laughs and finds a number for her online. An hour later a guy in his mid twenties comes with a tow truck and introduces himself as Mike. She smiles at him, shakes his hand and makes small talk while they ride back into town, her poor, dead car hogtied in the back. 

Once they get to the garage, she listens to a litany of strange words come out of Mike’s mouth before he says, “I can get it fixed today, but it’ll take me a few hours. There’s a diner just across the street and a mall a few blocks from here.”

He gives her directions and sends her off. She heads for the diner instead and sits in a window seat, reading a worn paperback, occasionally looking across the street, where Mike is crawling around under her car.

The waitress comes and goes, smiling secretively at her. She smiles back, agreeing that yes, the mechanic is hot. Eventually she gets bored and gets two coffees to go. She hands one to Mike and asks him about the garage and his life, telling him a bit in return. 

He smiles in all the right places and doesn’t seem to mind having company while he works. He wants to know where she’s headed and she shrugs ad tell him she’ll know when she gets there. He frowns, telling her that’s dangerous. She shakes her head. “Nothing’s going to happen to me.”

And it won’t. 

He fixes her car around closing time and shuffles his feet for a moment before asking her if she’d like to go for dinner. 

She shrugs. “Too late to get back on the road now anyway.”

.

Mike is good to her. He hooks her up with a job in the diner and she brings him coffee and conversation every day during her break. He takes her out in the evenings and never asks for anything and he kisses like he means it and when she goes a bit crazy on him he pecks her on the forehead or pats her hand and calls her ‘loopy girl’.

Being with him is easy and she sometimes thinks of another Mike she knew and how complicated everything was back then. Love and love and love, all burning so hot inside of her, making her blind for anything else. She wonders if the other Mike would have been this easy, if she’d ever given him the time of the day.

But she didn’t because she was caught up in Edward. It’s understandable she thinks. She was seventeen, uprooted, alone, an outsider. And he was dazzling and mysterious and strong. 

She tells Mike about him one night and he frowns and tells her that it sounds like Edward was controlling her. Trying to change her. She concedes the point because it’s true. Jake, her truck, her birthday party, their kisses. 

But he loved her, and she loved him until it ended. And a part of her will love him until the day she dies, she knows. Because he was her first and he looked at her like she was beautiful. That’s how first love works, Mike explains with a chuckle, telling her about a girl called Abby, who broke his heart when he was fifteen. 

.

They’ve had dinner and a movie when she stops in the middle of the street, waiting. The girl appears out of nowhere, tiny and blonde, a little thing of maybe sixteen. 

Her eyes are red as blood and she’s hungryhungryhungry, eyeing Mike like a piece of meat.

“No,” she tells the girl, stepping in front of him as he tries to pull her back.

That reptile gaze fixes on her and there’s fire in it. “Who the hell are you?”

She could say nothing. She could say her name. What leaves her mouth instead is, “Swan.”

The girl, visibly taken aback by her answer, hesitates for a moment and she uses it. Has to, because the humming is making her head feel like it’s going to burst. “He’s caught your trail. The one who’s after you.” The vampire’s eyes widen and this time there’s fear in them. She’s being followed by her maker, her master. She escaped, just barely. She didn’t choose this life anymore than anyone else. All the predators were once victims. 

“Go south. If you can slip through the front lines and make it to Mexico, he won’t follow you. He doesn’t set foot in the southern territories. But you have to go now and you can’t stop.”

Mike is confused and getting angry behind her, because he doesn’t understand. He’s human and he thinks he needs to know the how, the when and why. The vampire simply accepts the words. The dead know there’s more to the world than even they understand, she figures. Or maybe they can taste the truth in what she says, smell the freakishness on her.

“Why are you helping me?”

Because she can. Because she knows these things for a reason. Because that vampire was once a scared girl called Emily. Because she wants to. Because she needs to. 

“It’s what I do.”

She doesn’t know where it comes from, this cryptic shit, this playing with words and meaning. Loose screws and after party specials.

The vampire nods her silent thanks and disappears into the dark. Mike spins her around by her arm and barks, “What the hell?!”

.

Books, clothes, toothbrush.

.

The next one is a male that tries to get picked up as a hitchhiker. His eyes are dirty orange and he looks like a junkie, arms wrapped around his middle, panting and growling. She tells him of a coven in Alaska and a more peaceful way of life. 

She kicks him out of her car in a wooded area, suggesting he find some food and stay away from any other humans. He nods and exits the car before turning back and asking, through the window, “Why didn’t I eat you?”

“You weren’t supposed to.”

Yup. She’s getting really good at this cryptic stuff.

Now if only she could figure out who _is_ supposed to eat her. Because that something she’s looking for? She’s pretty sure it’s got fangs.

.

She turns twenty in bumfuck, Montana, waiting tables with a headache that’s been plaguing her for days.

It’s a cloudy day, rain in the air, when the door opens and two tall, dark skinned men push into the small bar and grill, filling it with their presence, death, menace and hunger. They’re both dressed poorly, obviously nomads, but they carry themselves with the pride of kings. It confuses people, scares them. All except her, the dumb little lamb who never quite figured out when to run for her life. 

She knows their names before she turns around to face them and the answer to their question. One of them, marginally older looking than the other, meets her gaze across the room. 

Quinn, the bartender comes out from behind the counter and steps up to them. “Can I help you, gentlemen?”

One of them raises a long, muscled arm and points a single digit straight at her. “Are you Swan?” he asks. 

They come looking for her now? That is new. She nods and weaves through the tables, feeling a dozen gazes heavy on her. “Let’s go outside,” she suggests, turning to Quinn to tell him she’s taking five. 

He shakes his head at her. “No offense, anyone, but you’re not going anywhere with those two, hon.”

She sighs and wonders why she has to draw overprotective males like a flame does moths. She meets red eyes and says, “Ask your question.”

The younger looking one looks at her with something like amusement and does. “Where is our brother?”

She smiles. “Ajo is still in Canada. He’ll meet you in Detroit.” And then, because she’s a bleeding heart – pun intended – she adds, “He’s safe and unhurt.”

And in front of her eyes, two killers turn into puppies, relief seeping out of their every pore. She almost laughs at the sight but doesn’t because while she knows, in that strange humming place in her head, that she’s safe, there are a dozen other people here who are not.

“Carver was right,” the older one says. 

“About what?” she wants to know. Quinn stands beside her, goggling stupidly, mouth hanging open.

“You,” they say I unison before turning and leaving just like they came, silently and deadly. 

.

After that, they just keep coming and with every impossible question she answers, she sheds a bit of the girl and become more of Swan. 

.

Books, clothes, toothbrush.

.

She adds to her theory.

Vampires aren’t only psychics 2.0. 

She doesn’t know what they are, but they are something more. Something that makes it so most of her hunches center around the undead. Something that makes it so they are drawn to her. They always find her and they never try to hurt her. 

Distant cousins maybe. Pieces of the same, giant, cosmic puzzle that no-one sees or understands. 

Maybe she’s not just the clumsy danger magnet. Maybe the vampires found her because they were meant to, because of that hum inside her head, the knowledge that shoots into her from nowhere. 

Maybe all this, every single vampire, every single question and answer, all the hurt, the broken bones, the fear, the exhilaration and the feeling of the cold, muddy forest ground under her numb body, maybe all this, leads to something. 

The something she’s waiting for.

.

Some of them come back, find her in her latest city, to thank her. Some come to show off what they have found. The older ones come to publicly announce the debts they feel they owe her.

One of them kindly explains a vampire debt to her. Blood he says. All about blood. She helps them protect their blood, they help her protect hers. She can call them to war and if she pleases, to death. 

She usually asks for news instead.

.

They tell her many things, over the months. Some are interesting, some completely meaningless. 

The Volturi have added to their guard. Marcus is growing more and more reclusive. The Romanians are stirring again, making their discontent heard. There’s a red headed bitch by the name of Victoria, going round and trying to create an army. No-one likes that much. Maria is pushing further north than she’s been since her Warmaker General left her almost a century ago. They say she’s making a play for Houston, but everyone agrees that she’ll be beaten back. 

Painfully.

All the way back to the Mexican border, a lonely old nomad called Alphonse reckons. It’ll take her decades to recover this time, if the Houston coven lets her. It’s time, he says, for these Southern Wars to end. They’ve been going on far too long, even by vampire standards.

In the neighboring booth a mother’s eyes grow wide ad she grabs her two boys, dragging them to the other end of the restaurant. She giggles and Alphonse smiles crookedly and her boss gives her the stink-eye.

.

Other bits of news hit closer to home. 

The Cullens are falling apart and reforming. The soldier, they say, has left the fold. The telepath is touring Europe, the beauty and the beast are drifting on their own every now and then. They have two new members, a couple that almost died in a car crash. 

They’re waiting out the newborn year in Denali, with the coven there.

She thinks that maybe she should have driven her car into a ditch. Maybe then she would have been good enough for Edward to keep. 

She pushes the thought aside and thanks the messenger. That bitterness, that’s the girl talking, not Swan. Swan is not the girl. Swan brings glimpses of happiness into people’s lives. A kind word, a right answer. Swan is serenely waiting for what she knows it coming for her.

.

Swan is lonely. 

.

She turns twenty-one is a place that looks exactly like the one she turned twenty in, the one she celebrated her nineteenth in. All the same. Three years of waiting, two years of searching and what has she got to show for it?

She’s got some serious waitressing skills and she freaks people out by knowing shit she has no right to know. Every other week a vampire pops up out of nowhere and scares whatever human company she manages to scrounge up. They ask their questions, take what they need and leave her with nothing but another move, another strip of road. 

She lives from hand to mouth, from job to shower to bed, from yesterday to tomorrow.

And nothing ever comes for her. No-one stays. No-one cares. She’s loopy girl, that name that Mike gave her, the one that lost all happy associations long ago.

She’s a fucking freak that even the love of her life couldn’t stand to be around, searching across the country for something that doesn’t exist, for the fever dream of a broken girl. 

And for the first time since Edward left her, she feels anger.

.

She hates her life.

.

She stops playing the game. When she knows a vampire’s coming, she drops her things, packs her bags and hits the highway. No more questions, no more answers. Let them take care of themselves. She’s not their human fucking oracle. 

She’s just a crazy girl who knows too much. 

Let them find someone else to use, to jerk around. 

The few that manage to catch up to her ask for Swan and she tells them she’s dead. She tells them to leave. Some of them do, others she has to slip away from at high noon, like a thief, when she’s the one that’s being stolen from.

.

She stops unpacking her books.

.

She has a close call in one of the Dakotas, she doesn’t even know which anymore. A coven, fairly big and organized, of three vampires. They come looking for her after her late shift at the diner, cornering her in a dark alley. They are looking for an enemy, one that hurt them, looking for him to tear him to pieces and burn them. 

She ducks and weaves and twists, somehow gets away from them only because she knows which way they are going to turn before they do. One of them manages to grab her, bruising her arm so badly she thinks it will fall off. She rips free and runs, finding a populated area to disappear in. 

At least here, in public, they won’t dare hurt her and when they find her again she spits a lie in their faces and is three hundred miles away by sunrise. 

.

She figures this is as good a time as any to finally visit Rene and she turns her car toward Arizona. The humming grows louder, more urgent with every mile she gets closer to her mother but she ignores it. 

She always ignores it these days.

She gets there and Rene is so happy, all smiles and hugs and random bouts of happy tears. It gets so much that, on the third day, she excuses herself and goes wandering through the city of her childhood, glad to have caught her nomad mother here instead of in Florida. She passes her old school, the playground she played at as a kid, the park she liked to have picnics in with Rene.

Eventually her feet carry her towards the burnt out shell of the ballet studio. It’s boarded up and sprayed on, an ugly warning to all who pass. She’s surprised it’s still there at all, but it is. She lingers on the sidewalk for almost an hour, intentionally not hearing the angry humming. 

Red eyes looming over her, fire spreading from her arm, life bleeding from her thigh. She can’t do this to Rene, to sweet, innocent Rene.

She’s out of town by sunset.

.

She stops unpacking her clothes next and keeps to the south, where the sunshine limits their movements and keeps her exit routes open. 

.

Motel rooms only, jobs for a week and often she bails before she can collect her paycheck. She dips into her funds for the first time and Charlie notices, calls, worries when she gives him a new location every time they talk.

“Are you in danger, honey?” he finally asks after a couple of months, unable to keep it in anymore. 

She shakes her head at the phone and hastens to assure him that she’s fine. He doesn’t buy it. “I may be old,” he says, “But I’m not stupid. You’re running for something. Please, let me help.”

Silence. 

“It’s not… it’s not him, is it?” 

“No, Dad. Edward has nothing to do with this.” Not anymore. “I’m not running,” she repeats. “I’m searching. You know that.”

He doesn’t believe it and she can’t fault him for it, because she doesn’t either.

.

Some days, she tucks her toothbrush back into her bag right after brushing her teeth. She sleeps in her street clothes and dreams of gold and red in the dark, hunting her.

.

She wakes one day and knows that she has to call Jake. She tries not to, tries to ignore the feeling, the knowledge because that’s not how she rolls. Not anymore.

But it’s Jake and so she calls him for the first time in over a year and he tells her that they finally got the bitch. Victoria is so much ashes. Bella is free. Free to come home, he says. 

She tells him she loves him and hangs up. 

.

The second time one of them catches up to her she doesn’t get away. He’s strong and angry, firefirefire, looking for his mate, who disappeared days ago. Love, fear, possessiveness and rage make him burn and she never stands a chance.

She tries to run but he has her by the throat before she’s taken five steps. He slams her into the wall, feet dangling above the ground, choking. He pushes his face into hers, fangs glistening with venom, eyes dark with the desire to crack her open like an egg and pick the knowledge he needs out of her. 

“Where is she?” he howls and she cringes, pulls at his arm without moving him an inch. 

She’s crying and her tears taste like salt as she struggles to get away, shaking her head no. She won’t tell. She can’t tell. She’s that girl, that girl on the forest floor and she’s so cold, so alone, so empty. She’s eighteen and her insides feel like ice, she’s twenty-one and there is nothing waiting for her anywhere, nothing but more loneliness.

Maybe this is the best way. The vampires that came for her never hurt her before but that was while she upheld her end of this cosmic bargain. If she keeps her mouth shut, if she bites her tongue, this one will end her and it will be all over. 

No more waiting.

No more searching.

She looks away from his looming face, squeezing her eyes closed, trying to not hear the humming, trying to unknow all she knows. If she keeps silent now, this man’s mate will be dead before sunrise, torn apart and set on fire. She’ll be gone and he’ll follow after her because he loves her and has since he set eyes on her in Chicago in 1923, where she was dancing with sad eyes and a sadder smile. He changed her and hasn’t left her side since then. Not one day in almost ninety years.

Swan yells all that at her while the girl sobs in a corner, wishing that someone loved her that much.

“The red coven,” she gasps. “They have her downtown, in the basement of an old warehouse. Hurry.”

.

She stops running.

She stops hiding.

She stops packing her toothbrush every morning and sometimes she even pulls out a book.

But she stops laughing, too. And talking. 

She spent half a year running and the humming never so much as faltered or changed, a constant warning at the back of her head. A reminder.

Something waiting. 

It used to give her peace, that thought. Now it makes her clench her fists and try to scrounge up hate.

.

So she plays the game again. Traveling, searching, soothsaying. But she takes no pleasure from it. 

.

“Ask your question,” she tells them.

And they do.

She answers.

That is all.

No names, no stories, no news, no tales. No bonds. She’s Swan and she’s just passing through, an accumulation of all you never knew. 

.

She calls Charlie and Rene alternately, one Sunday Forks, the other Phoenix. She knows the keep each other up to date about her and she can’t work up the energy to do much more than let them know she’s alive. 

They don’t understand, but she thinks the fear of losing her completely keeps them silent. She’s sorry about it but doesn’t change it. 

.

“Why’re you always so sad?” Hannah asks. Hannah is a coworker, nineteen and pretty fresh out of high school. 

Those two years between them? They feel like a fucking life time. Hannah is so sweet and young, so willing to see the silver lining in every raincloud even though she’s stuck in the middle of nowhere, waitressing to feed herself and her sick and dying mother, even though she’ll never leave this place, or find her dreams. She smiles every time she pours a cup of coffee. Every. Single. Time. 

Her cheeks hurt just watching.

But it’s impossible to be angry with Hannah because it’s real. That smile, it’s real. So she just shrugs. “I guess I forgot how to be happy.”

“You should do somethin’ nice,” the other girl says, refilling salt shakers. 

“Something nice?” Dubiously.

“Yeah. Y’know, for yourself. Or for someone else. Just… do somethin’ nice.”

“Nice isn’t always the way to go,” she points out. She’s been nice for years, helping, always givinggivinggiving. And what did it get her?

The only thing she really has to show for her good deeds is her continued health. And the jury’s still out on what that’s worth. 

Hannah looks at her, sadly, blinking twice. Then she smiles and shrugs and goes to wipe down the tables, not sure how to deal with someone who’s utterly ruined at the tender age of twenty-one.

Can’t blame the girl. She doesn’t know either.

.

She’s finally old enough to work at a bar and hell, does she ever. She picks up bartending pretty fast after that, because the ass grabbing on the other side of the bar makes her want to break fingers. Better to have them leer at her cleavage but stay out of actual groping range. 

There’s this bar in… where the hell is she anyway? It’s a moderately big city, she knows that much. Apart from that, one sign just blurs with all the others, leaving her a bit lost. 

That’s a metaphor. 

There’s this bar, medium sized, dark and always smoke-stale, even at high noon. It’s comfy, even though the crowd runs towards the more dangerous end of the spectrum. Bikers and gangsters and she learns within her first week never to set foot in the back alley. She doesn’t need to get pulled into some drug related business, thank you very much. 

But the boss is a gruff old grizzly who takes care of his girls and everyone who sets foot into Malley’s knows to treat ‘em ladies right. And that includes awesome tips.

During her third week there, the door gets pushed open around midnight and a hush falls over the place, interrupted only by nervous jitters. She’d smile at how all the big, bad criminals suddenly act like prey, if she could find anything even remotely funny in it. She just keeps preparing drinks, three beers, two Patron shots, one whiskey on the rocks. Double, because Marty likes his drinks like that. 

She’s pretty sure she’s the only one in the joint still moving, apart from the newcomer. She puts the drink down in front of Marty and keeps her hands busy until he speaks. “Swan.”

He’s far too close, leaning over the bar, right in her face. He’s half a mile beyond six feet, built in a way that would make Emmett think twice and he wants something from her.

Everyone does.

She looks up, dishrag and glass stilling in her hands. “Yeah.”

BobbyB, her boss, comes waddling towards her. She ignores him and tells the red-eyed vampire, “Ask your question.”

“Antone Piaggo. Is he dead?”

Coven blood feud. Nasty stuff. Been going on for almost two hundred years. She nods. “Pile of ashes.”

The vampire nods once, curtly, and spins on his heel, leaving. Slowly, movement around her picks up again but she keeps feeling eyes like daggers in her back. She looks at BobbyB, who’s frowning at her.

“Want me to quit?” She knows this scene all too well.

He spins once on his axis, taking in the place, the people. Then he shakes his head. “Nah.”

.

She becomes a bit of an attraction at Malley’s. She’s an assassin, a spy, a seer, a mob bride, a dealer, a cat burglar, a killer, an alien. She’s the girl who knows the fucking creepy people. 

For the first time, humans call her Swan with that same lilt, that undertone, that the undead have been using for years. 

The humming just keeps growing louder.

.

“Ask your question.”

.

“Two weeks. Then it’s safe again.”

.

“Ask your question.”

.

“She’s dead.”

.

The humming fills her mind like water does a bucket, fills it up, louder and louder and some days, she feels like her head is going to explode from the vibration.

.

“Ask your question.”

.

“Go east. Don’t stop.”

.

She turns twenty-two at Malley’s and Marty buys her a drink. BobbyB gives her an extra fifty. The vampire of the week doesn’t care that she’s officially a year older again. She just wants her information.

Afterwards she throws the dishrag over her shoulder and stands there, behind the bar, with her eyes closed, just breathing. She goes backwards, one birthday after another, sees herself grow softer, weaker, more naïve. Sees herself turn eighteen and believe in happy endings, sees herself turn seventeen and have no idea of what goes bump in the night. 

Sixteen, fifteen, five.

She’s changed so much.

She’s all Swan now.

“Sugah,” BobbyB asks in a broad southern drawl. “Sugah, what’s it about you that’s got all them freaks runnin’ after ya?”

A shrug. “I’m just pretty.”

He laughs and shakes his head, running a hand over his beer gut. “How’d your momma keep ‘em off you, eh?”

“There was a boy,” she tells him, looking at him out of the corner of her eye.

“There always is.”

This time it’s her who laughs and he pours two shots of vodka, raising one to her in a toast. 

“To you, sugah. To you.”

.

Louder.

.

“Ask your question.”

.

And louder still, filling her up like water.

.

“Ask your question.”

She speaks with her back toward them, trying to decide which flavor of canned soup it’s going to be tonight. Chicken? Tomato?

No response. They just stand behind her, half bracketing but not blocking, staring at her back. Eventually it gets awkward and she turns. The female is short and blonde, beautiful in a way that makes people stop and stare on the street. The male is tall and blonde, cut from stone. Soldier. Both have dirty orange eyes, not red, not gold.

They smile.

“I’m Peter,” the male says, pointing to himself and bowing deeply. Old school then. “And this lovely thing is my mate, Charlotte.”

She weighs the chicken soup can in her hand and repeats, “Ask your question.”

She has no interest in names, in small talk. In anything. The humming is a million bees inside her skull and all she wants is to close her eyes and just _stop_. 

Peter mock frowns. “What? No conversation?”

Charlotte rolls her eyes and sighs a bit, but doesn’t stop him. 

She drops the can in her basket and drops her arm to her side. Waiting. Always waiting. Eventually Peter shrugs and takes a deep, unneeded breath. 

Charlotte holds out her hand and they both smile brilliantly. In her head, the humming reaches a fever pitch, filling her ears, her thoughts, spreading down into her ribcage, hammering along her spine, blinding, deafening. 

Louder, louder, louder.

A crescendo.

Peter says, “Are you ready to go home, Bella?”

And then…

Silence.

.  
.


	2. Names

.

**Names**

.

The very first thing Peter sees in this world, is Jasper Fucking Whitlock’s beautiful mug. 

Now, technically, he knows that’s not true. He’s twenty-four years old when he first lays eyes on the Major and those years weren’t spent blind in the dark. It’s just that they’re faint and fading, only sketches of memories. Unimportant. He knows that his name is Peter. His last name, the name of an absent father, has never mattered much so he conveniently forgot it. He knows that he’s twenty-four, that he’s a soldier, that he loved his momma. 

And he knows that that face looming above him means something to him. It’s the face his death wore when it came for him and now it’s the face that matters, above all others. 

Sire. Maker. Blood and venom. Vampire. Maria. Blood. Newborn. Rage. Hunger. Blood. Lust. Blood. Fight. Army. Obey. Obeyobeyobeybloodbloodblood. 

Major. 

. 

Eventually, things start making sense through the red haze of emotion ripping him apart. He figures that’s the newborn rage fading and gives himself points for remembering this shit. 

He starts answering when the Major talks, starts contributing. He’s a soldier. He can do this. One day he gets pulled aside and the Major says, low and gravelly, “Keep that up, and you might not land in the dumps.” 

Peter knows what the dumps are. They were one of the first things that got through the haze. The dumps are the place where soldiers go when they’re of no use anymore. Whispers in the camp say that the only one who hasn't gone to the dumps so far is the Major. They say he’s the Warmaker and they say it with their eyes lowered and their arms wrapped around themselves. 

Peter figures that anyone the monsters are afraid of is pretty damn dangerous and definitely someone he wants to stick to like a fly to shit.

So he does. 

He nods and whispers a sharp, “Yessir.” 

. 

He figures it’s been half a year when things start really making sense. Not the distorted, twisted sense of clear days mixed with hazy, red ones, but actual, sane-people sense. 

They’re on a campaign because they’re always on a campaign. There’s no downtime, no home base. Only new cannon fodder that comes and goes. He’s one of those poor shits. He should be at the front lines. But the Major saw something in him, somehow, and pulled him aside. Maybe it’s because he managed to work through the hunger earlier than he was supposed to. Maybe it’s because he gets these weird flashes, these pictures of things. Sometimes he just _knows_ shit and he has no clue why. But he hasn’t told anyone about those slips. 

Still, the Major notices pretty much everything that’s going on around him. The man’s a fucking machine. He drinks, he beats up newborns that have twice his physical strength, plays their screwed up power games with Maria, wins every battle he fights and then goes back and does it all again. He’s a ruthless asshole and he’s Peter’s ticket to survival. 

Some days, Peter almost manages to keep up. 

. 

They’re surrounded and outnumbered eight to one and the Major slowly turns with the leader of the enemy group, muttering, “Of course I get fucking ambushed. With a fading newborn as my only damn backup.” Well, that would be kind of insulting. If it weren’t true. And then, in the same volume, he says, “Remind me to kill our sentinels when we get out of here.” 

So Peter was meant to hear that after all. He snaps a crisp salute, grunting in affirmative without taking his eyes off the tiny redhead that’s looking at him like a cat at a mouse. 

“Fantastic,” the Warmaker – because this is the Warmaker -- growls. 

And then it’s on and honestly, Peter has no idea how he survives. He remembers his training, the bits that were beaten into him to the point of driving him mad. Go for the neck, take the head, rip off anything that moves. The enemy vampires around them all sort of stumble when the Warmaker does his thing, abject terror and crippling loss on their faces and Peter jumps right in, taking a head and throwing it like he doesn’t mean for it to ever come down, as far from the battle as he can. 

After that he just keeps moving and everything disappears in that familiar red haze and a minute later, it’s over. He comes out of the rage with a few bites missing and everything else mostly intact. The Warmaker stands in the middle of the carnage, bleeding, his left arm missing, kicking at a hand that’s trying to crawl up his leg. Peter makes to take a step closer but the other man’s gaze shoots up to lock on his, pitch black and dark like midnight. 

Deadly. 

A growl issues from his throat as he crouches low, ready to attack again. Ready to kill, even with one of his arms gone. Peter takes a step back, very slowly, every instinct he has screaming at him to runrunrun because this is the devil, this is the face his first death wore and why not his second, too. There are nearly a dozen dead at the Major’s feet and all of them were stronger and faster than he. They’re still dead. They’re dead and he’s standing and looking at Peter like he’s a bug to be squashed. 

“Easy there, Major,” he cautions, “Let’s find your arm, yeah?” 

. 

That night, after fires burn and the arm’s found and the Warmaker’s literally ripped the sentinels apart, he calls Peter to his tent, across the camp from Maria’s. 

The Major looks up from the maps he’s studying and says, “You’re not dead.” 

The smartass in Peter wants to reply with, “Technically….” 

The rest of him tells the smartass to shut the hell up. “No, sir.” 

Silence. Then, “I want you to help me train the new arrivals later.” 

. 

You see, this strange knowing thing he has going all of a sudden? Once he figures out he’s not, in fact, going completely nutty, it’s pretty spectacular. He knows that the Major is an empath before he ever sees – feels – him pull his shit. He knows that Maria is one bitch he does not want to cross before he ever lays eyes on her. 

He knows that somewhere, there’s a pretty blonde, just for him. 

He knows that one day, he’ll call the Major brother. 

. 

Peter was a good little soldier when he was alive. 

Peter is still a good little soldier now that he’s dead. 

He follows orders, uses his little trick to stay alive, doesn’t fuck up too badly and keeps his head down a lot. He’s more rational than most people around this place and so he gets put in charge of some of them pretty quickly and before he knows it, he’s pretty much the Major’s mouthpiece when it comes to the running and training of this ragtag undead army. 

He doesn’t remember what his life’s goals were when he was alive, but he’s pretty sure that this wasn’t one of them. 

. 

Strategy. That always leads to arguments. 

Maria wants to send in all they have and fuck who dies. 

Whitlock wants to divide and conquer, be smart about it. 

Maria wants her Major at the very back of the battle, safe and unlikely to catch fire until she unleashes the Warmaker in him and aims him. Peter is pretty sure that if the bitch were capable of something even close to love, she’d be head over heels for Whitlock. When the man’s around her, he reaches new levels of ruthlessness and psychosis. Luckily for all of them, he’s not around her much. 

Whitlock wants to be at the front of the field, where the action is, because ripping, tearing and crippling is what he’s good at. 

Maria wants this, he wants that. Round and round and round and Peter stands in the corner, waiting and watching as the Major takes Maria’s orders and demands and twists them until they are his own. He makes her believe that what he wants is what she wants and she buys it. 

It’s amazing to watch and half the time it works. The other half it doesn’t. 

Today she hits him in the face hard enough for the crack to echo like thunder before spitting orders at him and stomping out. His eyes turn liquid night as he watches her retreating back, imagining it in pieces, probably. 

Peter moves to help him up and gets a growl and a face full of fangs as thanks. “Fuck,” he bites out, scared as hell because he’s seen this guy in action, thanks a lot, and he does not want all that rage focused on him. Ever. “Calm the hell down, Jasper.” 

Everything freezes. He just called the Warmaker by his given name. No-one calls the Major by his name. Not even the bitch. Peter is as good as dead and that stupid image, that idea – calling him brother – is to blame. 

Then Whitlock pulls back, eyes red again and storms out of the tent. He hits one of the supporting poles with his open palm as he goes, shattering it like a match and sending the whole tent falling down. Peter, buried under swathes of fabric and broken poles, isn’t sure whether to sob or laugh. 

. 

He’s slogging through corpses. No, seriously. A field of fucking corpses and some of the parts are still moving. The ones that aren’t belonged to the humans whose blood turns the edge of his vision fuzzy red. 

He picks heads out of the piles of corpses. Those go in a separate fire before everything else because without the heads, the damn limbs stop fighting back. He picks another one out of a heap that looks like it might make a complete Caucasian male and makes his way across the village square with his bounty. 

Two of the more reliable cannon fodder are tending the fire and they both step back from the flying cinders when he throws four heads onto the pyre. Then he turns and slowly surveys the damage they caused. Yesterday, this was a village full of humans. Today, it looks like a scene out of a nightmare. Blood, limbs, guts and the stench of death in the air. All because Maria wanted five more miles of desert to call her own. 

“She’s fucking insane,” he mutters to no-one in particular, almost jumping out of his skin when a heavy hand lands on his shoulder. 

The Major stands next to him, eyes glowing bright red with all the blood they drank, face forbidding. Peter swallows and thinks that this is probably a good time to pray because he just called Maria insane out loud in front of the man that runs her army. 

But then the Major wheels around, grabs one of the fire-tenders by the neck and beheads him, throwing him into the fire in the same movement. The other one turns to run on sheer instinct and crumbles to his knees with a scream of pure agony as Jasper projects every ounce of rage he has into the poor sod. He’s still screaming when his head lands in the fire. 

The Major turns back to Peter, eyes still red and tells him, voice perfectly even, “Careful. You never know who’s listening.” 

.

Peter was a simple man in life. All he needed was some booze, some women and a tall tale to spin. The time to sleep off his hang over the next morning was a bonus, but not necessary. 

These days, booze tastes like shit and the women are all either bitches or too scared to blink around him so all that’s left are his tall tales. He entertains the Major with them sometimes, when the whole no-sleep thing gets tedious and all either of them wants is to switch off for a few hours.

He tells the other man about the few crazy stunts he remembers from being human, tells about the crap the newborns get up to all the time and invents whatever else he wants. He makes all the jokes he can’t outside of the tent, where people could listen, and he laughs about them because that’s how he’s always been. Crude jokes and laughter. The Major usually doesn’t look at him but he just keeps blathering on because that’s what he’s good at, killing shit and running off at the mouth and sometimes, when a human’s voice would have long since cracked, the Major opens the floodgates and bathes Peter in a wave of gratitude.

He never says the words and Peter never tries to make him, but they both feel what the other feels. And maybe Peter is still a simple man even in death, because it’s enough.

. 

One of the flashes keeps coming back. 

It’s him and the Major – Jasper, then -- sitting in a living room with two women. One is the blonde girl, the one that will be his, one day. The other is a brunette with big, reptile-yellow doe eyes. Jasper has a book, the women are talking and Peter is lying with his head in his girl’s lap, just listening. 

They’re happy. 

. 

His year runs out quickly. Too quickly. He stands at the edge of the dumps, watching the never dying pyres, wondering if he’ll be next. Most of his compatriots aren’t sane enough to really understand their situation, but he understands just fine. 

His power and his speed are running out. To Maria, he’s lost his use. He doesn’t even consider running. He’s seen what the Major does to the deserters and he knows he won’t be the one that gets away. No-one leaves this army, unless it’s as ashes on the wind. 

“Maria wants to talk to you.” Jasper ambles over, coming to a halt beside him, taking in the scene. 

“You gonna put me in that fire afterwards, sir?” 

A sideways look, all Major again, the man underneath eaten by the monster. “That depends on you, doesn’t it, soldier?” 

. 

Maria tells him he’ll live as long as he is useful. He nods and leaves the tent silently, wishing really hard that he could get drunk. 

. 

Ten years later, the Major returns to camp carrying a blonde woman who’s either knocked out or passed out from fear. 

He dumps her in his tent unceremoniously, studying her face. Peter takes a single look at her and freezes in his tracks. 

It’s her. His. The woman of his waking dreams. 

His head shoots up, eyes meeting the Major’s and for once, he’s not afraid of the other man, who looks at the shock in his face with something akin to satisfaction. 

“Eat or keep?” he asks, callous as anything and his carefully vicious expression lets Peter know that somehow, some way, the Major’s on to him. Goddamn empathy. 

“Keep,” Peter says and he’s sure all and sundry can hear the crack in his voice. 

Whitlock kicks at the girl’s stomach without force. “Sure? She’s tiny. Probably not going to put up much of a fight.” 

Why are they having the conversation? The Major turns only two kinds of people. The ones he wants to and the ones Maria orders him to. Peter’s opinion has never mattered. 

Still, he repeats, “Keep.” 

Lips pursed, the Major considers the prone human before nodding to himself. “Very well.” 

A split second later he’s kneeling in the dirt, his teeth buried in her neck. Peter looks away. 

. 

The girls, blonde and brunette, his and Jasper’s, walk down a sunlit path hand in hand, glittering like diamonds, whispering to each other like school girls. 

He has to bite his lip to keep in the low keening noise threatening to escape, along with the question, “When, goddamnit?!”

.

Her name is Charlotte and he knows the second he looks into her eyes that she’s his. She blinks and cocks her head, all instinct and thirst, too off kilter to understand anything beyond her name and simple orders. 

He wants to touch her, hold her, love her, keep her, take her away. 

But more than that, he wants to protect her. There are no mated pairs in the Southern Texas Army. There’s only soldiers. So instead of touching her he snarls at her and pushes past her, pretending not to care. 

Jasper’s dark eyes on him across the camp tell him he’s failing miserably. 

. 

“Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte.” It’s a mantra from his mouth into her hair, into her scent, her touch, the feeling of her pressed against him. They’re far enough from the camp to be safe, far enough to steal this moment but it’s not enough to do anything. Only this. Only, “Charlotte, Charlotte, Charlotte.” 

She breathes into his chest, still too young to realize that the reflex is obsolete now. She’s scared, so very scared. Whenever she sees past the bloodlust, all around her is death and pain. She’s far too gentle for this world, this life and it kills him that it’s his fault she’s here. He should have said ‘eat’. Better to end as a corpse in a ditch than to live this life. 

“We’ve gotta get out of here,” he mutters, to himself more than her. 

Her hands clench in his clothes, her entire body going rigid. “We can’t,” she whispers. “The Warmaker.” 

Maybe they should all be dead. 

. 

Names are important. 

Don’t ask him why. They just are. He’s Peter and that’s his identity. That’s all he kept from his human life, all he wants and needs to and will be. 

She’s Charlotte and with every time he says her name, she becomes a bit more of the woman she must have been before the blood. 

The newborns have no names. They are nameless, faceless cannon fodder. They live as long as they are useful and then they go in the dumps and that’s the end of them. They need no grave markers because they have no names. They are only ashes. 

The Major has many names. He’s the Major when he fights, when he commands and kills and rips to shreds. He’s the Major when he faces Maria and uses her twisted love for him to get his way. He’s the Major when he tears off limbs for the tiniest infraction. 

He’s the Warmaker when his eyes go black and all logic, all rational thought leaves him and only the hunger and the rage are left. He’s the Warmaker when Maria aims him at a battalion of newborns and tells him, “Kill them all,” and he does.

He’s Whitlock during downtime, between battles, in the lull that every soldier loves and dreads in equal measures. He’s Whitlock when there’s no blood. 

He’s only ever Jasper when they are alone. In his tent, in the desert, in the moments of silence that come so rarely. Peter has called him Jasper exactly three times. The first was an accident, the second was after they razed a school filled with mortal children to the ground on Maria’s orders. 

The third was on a random night, on a random patch of dirt, while they sat and waited for nothing in particular. Each of those three times, Peter held his breath for a moment in sheer terror and Jasper studied him, eyes narrowed. Because names are important and Peter’s pretty sure that ‘Jasper’ is the name the Major assigned to his last few scraps of humanity. 

But then he relaxes and let’s Peter have the name, lets him have those pieces. 

. 

Two weeks after Charlotte starts lagging behind during drills, the Major grabs her by the arm and drags her toward the dumps. Peter, who saw it coming, is waiting there, having sent the fire-tenders away. 

The Major flings her forward carelessly and she lands in the dirt, too scared to use all that grace and power. Peter growls and steps in front of her prone form. She gasps and tries to pull him back, clinging to his leg, panicking. She’s so scared. 

The Major looks him straight in the eye, ice cold scorn and resentment visible in his gaze. There’s no surprise. Of course not. Can’t hide love from the empath. 

Peter closes his eyes briefly and thinks that maybe he should pray. Then he crouches, ready to spring. Ready to protect his mate. The Major laughs in his face because they both know how this will end. 

Peter’s good, but he’s not that good. So he does the only thing he can. “Please, Jasper.” 

Names matter and Jasper is the name the Major gave the last scraps of his humanity. Peter calls on those. 

For a moment he’s sure he’s dead. The Major, the Warmaker, Whitlock and Jasper are all in agreement, all angry. He’s abandoning them all for a random newborn too pathetic to stand her own ground. 

Then the Major straightens from his own crouch and snaps, “Go.” 

Peter gapes and Charlotte sobs. 

“Go,” he repeats, “I can give you a day, but not more.” 

Then he turns, very deliberately giving them his back, and walks away. Peter hoped for this, wanted this, prayed for it. But he didn’t dare believe it. 

“Thank you,” he whispers into the wind. 

Jasper just keeps walking. 

. 

They go to New York. 

They go to New York because Charlotte hears about it from a few humans that pass their hiding place in the desert one day. Hears them say, “In N’York, things are diff’rent.” 

They steal clothes and go dancing, go window shopping, laugh with the humans, drive them mad with their beauty and their dazzle, basking in their warmth and their blood. They lose themselves in the throngs of living, fading humans and they love it. 

For a while. 

. 

They stand in Times Square and he sees them again, the girls, blonde and brunette, only this time, Charlotte is already here and her future self walks right through her present self, blurring both. The brunette, reptile doe-eyed girl turns around and calls to Jasper. Peter whips his head in the direction she’s waving, but sees only today.

.

He watches as Charlotte gently lowers her dinner to the ground, brushing an auburn strand out of the young woman’s face. She looks up at him, eyes wide and sad and he asks, “What’s wrong, babe?” 

She shrugs as she stands, wiping her bloody hands on her pretty dress without care. “She was nice, Pete. Gentle. Kind. And hurt and so sad.” 

Her beautiful face is scrunched up and he does what he does best. He puts a smile on her face. “Anything ya wanna tell me, darlin’?” 

There it is, that smile. She shakes her head and then half nods. “I see people. It’s nothing special.” 

“See them how?” 

Another shrug. “What they’re like. If they’re good or bad. If they’re lying. It’s sort of around them. In the air.” 

She looks away, ashamed and scared because she knows he doesn’t like secrets. He’s kept too many of them in this life. She’s scared so often, still, and he thinks that even though she was part of the army the shortest amount of time, she’s the more damaged of them. He’s harder than her and Jasper was harder still. Or maybe they’re just deader. 

So he grins and wraps an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close. “D’you think you can see who it was that hurt her?” 

. 

It’s her husband. He hit her and he tastes like cheap whiskey and dirt. 

And because of the look of relief killing an evil man puts on her face, they stick with the bad crowd from then on. 

. 

He develops his own test to figure out if someone is worth eating or not. He simply walks up to his chosen snack and asks them for a dime. His story changes. Sometimes he needs it for a phone call, sometimes for a ride. Sometimes he’s a bit short for a newspaper. If they give him the money, or at least make an honest effort to, they live. If they growl at him, call him names and send him away, they’re fair game. 

Philosophers wonder what a man’s life is worth. The answer is: A dime. 

He knows the method is not fool proof, or in fact, all that useful. A good person might have a bad day, a bad person might have a good day. That’s not what it’s about. He doesn’t do this to calm his conscience because his conscience says he’s a predator and it’s not his fault humans are prey. 

He does it because it makes his little lady happy. He does it because he spilled enough blood in a life time. He does it because he’s not in the South anymore and it’s his choice now. He decides who he kills. 

His choice. 

. 

They tire of New York within a few years and make their way to Boston. He loves Boston. He loves the museums and the libraries, appreciating them in ways he’s pretty sure he never did as a human. He’s not about to turn all pussy or anything, but, let’s just say, he actually has the mental capacity and the time to understand Proust now, even if the fucker’s a total nutcase. 

And every time he sets foot in a library he stops and inhales the scent of yellowing pages and remembers the chest in the Major’s tent, crammed full with all kinds of books, like a treasure trove of words. 

Jasper would love these places. 

Charlotte finds him at one of the reading tables in a distant, quiet corner, book open in front of him, staring blankly at the history section. She sits across from him, laying her hand on his. 

“You know what I see when I look at you?” She asks and he shakes his head because he’s wondered, sure, but he doesn’t want to know. Not really. Too much blood. 

She just keeps going. “I see a good man, Peter.” 

She pats his hand once and then pushes away from the chair, standing. “Now let’s go and free the Major from that bitch’s claws.” 

. 

It’s because of the girl. The brunette. The Major’s never going to find her. Not while Maria still has her claws and fangs in him. 

And as fucking cliché as it sounds, that man, the one Peter wants to call brother, he deserves for someone to love him. His very own Charlotte. 

He deserves someone to sooth the monster. And he’s not going to find her in Texas. 

. 

In the end, they decide to hell with planning and walk right into camp like they belong. They make sure Maria’s wherever she goes when she’s not terrifying the masses and then waltz right into the Major’s tent, announcing themselves by flinging open the flap and stomping the dirt from their boots. 

The Major’s already crouched and ready to break them to pieces when he recognizes them. The Warmaker’s out to play. “Relax, Major,” Peter drawls, hands raised. 

“What the hell are you doing here? Do you want me to kill you?” And he will. He let them go once and he probably paid for it in blood and body parts. 

Still, this is not the time to apologize for leaving the only friend he ever had in this life behind. Leaving him to his own monsters. “Nope,” he says, popping the ‘p’. “You’re coming with us.” 

“What. The. Fuck?” 

There’s blackness and death in the Major’s eyes and Peter stands against it the only way he knows. Damn cocky with a swagger in his hip. “Jasper, my man, this is a rescue mission.” 

He’s pretty sure it’s the ‘Jasper’ that does it. Names are important. He relaxes slightly, stepping back from the killing edge he’s constantly teetering on and asks, almost amused now. “Why the fuck should I come with you?” 

It’s Charlotte who answers, surprisingly. This is the first time she’s ever spoken in the Warmaker’s presence. “Because life out there is… it’s amazing. You should see it.” 

He closes his eyes, taking a deep, unneeded breath. Then he mutters, “She’s gonna kill us all.” 

Peter clasps Jasper – not the Major, not Whitlock, not the Warmaker – on the shoulder and offers, cocky as all get out, “She’d have to catch us first.” 

. 

The extent of what Maria did to him only becomes obvious after they get him away from her. Peter and Charlotte, they thought they had in bad in that camp, that war, that madness. But they didn’t feel it. 

Jasper – because suddenly he is Jasper – spent eighty years surrounded by the rage, thirst and rabid _need_ of hundreds of newborns, coupled with Maria’s and her bitch sisters’ sick desires and pleasures and the death throes of every single human and vampire ever killed in his presence. 

Charlotte looks at him in that tent with wide eyes and a sickened expression on her face. She didn’t know what was him, she tells Peter later. She couldn’t find the person under all the negative emotion piled onto and into him. 

But slowly, painfully, all the foreign pieces drop away like splinters of a cracking shell and underneath… well, Peter’s fairly sure that the person they’re beginning to see is the twenty-year-old boy that got brutally murdered on the side of a road in Texas for the crime of trying to help. 

It’s fucking painful, is what it is. 

. 

He flinches when someone calls him Major now and they don’t try calling him Warmaker. Ever. 

. 

Wherever they go, Peter has one eye peeled for dark brown hair and golden eyes, waitingwatingwaiting. He regularly curses under his breath, wondering where she is. 

Why she’s so late. 

Eventually Char starts looking at him funny because he stares at women like he wants to eat them all the time, a constipated look on his face. He apologizes for his ‘leering’ and tells her what he’s looking for only once Jasper is safely out of earshot. 

“A little sister?” she asks, curious and a bit excited. She gets lonely with only ‘her two lumps’ around, she says. 

“A little sister,” he echoes and feels his dead heart warm when she smiles brightly and promises to start helping him look for reptile doe eyes. 

. 

The humans’ war over in Europe is making a lot of vampires flee the scene. Conditions over there are too unpredictable to risk sticking around. Suddenly having to leave your lair in bright sunshine kind of gives away the whole sparkling thing. Food is aplenty in central Europe and Russia, but they risks are too great. 

But this continent is becoming kind of crowded. 

They cross paths with other nomads all the time and more than half of them aren’t friendly, looking to establish a territory or a name for themselves in the new world. Many of them are old and arrogant because they come from more ‘civilized’ places. 

Well, they show them just how civilized this country can be. Peter’s hunches give them the where and when and how and Charlotte can tell, after one glance, who’s enemy, who’s alley, who’s leader and who’s follower. 

And then Jasper overloads them with pleasure or pain – depending on his mood, bringing them to their knees. Peter has been on the receiving end of that once or twice, when the Warmaker got pissed and dropped the entire army with the sheer power of his frustration and he’s really not keen on a repeat performance, but watching it? Awesome. 

They are a three man army and once the enemy is on their knees, they put their battlefield experience to good use and make quick work of killing everything that moves. 

They are already infamous because they are the only ones to ever escape Maria’s clutches and the Warmaker’s reputation precedes him wherever he goes, his scars and his skills making him painfully recognizable. But they’re getting a whole new rep now and Peter’s not sure he likes being famous. Not for being a good killer. Sure, it’s nice to be respected, but he’s had his share of fear. 

And the look of pleasure and disgust on Jasper’s face every time someone cowers at his feet in terror make him wish they were entirely nameless. 

. 

There are upsides to this life, though, besides being free. They’re not always fighting and Peter’s skills are awesome, if he does say so himself.

He _knows_ shit. 

And that makes him the best prankster in the entire world. He makes Char laugh and he pulls Jazz out of his funks and he reminds them all of the good things in life that they’ve never experienced. 

Once, after he pulled off a spectacular act of derring-do and sheer stupidity, Jasper and Charlotte cling to each other like life lines, laughing so hard they would be crying tears of mirth if they could. Jasper is putting out enough giddiness to make everyone in the vicinity high as a kite and Charlotte tries to speak through her laughter but can’t. 

Peter likes to think he taught them that. 

. 

It’s 1943 and Charlotte wants to buy a house. They have the money, thanks to Peter’s skills and their oftentimes faulty moral compass, so there’s nothing that speaks against it. 

They are all a bit tired of the constant wandering and their names are enough of a household word amongst their kind to ensure they’ll be left alone for the most part. 

The only problem is that, in order to buy a house, they need identities. They need last names. 

Jasper disappears for two days and when he comes back, he flings passports and papers at them, brand spanking new and real enough for a single house. 

Peter flicks his passport open and blinks stupidly. Peter Whitlock. He didn’t see that one coming. Leaning over, he finds that Charlotte has the same last name. Jasper’s name. They both look up at their friend and he shrugs, putting out waves of discomfort. “You’re married,” he explains before nodding at Peter, “And you’re my brother.” 

He looks at the floor, ashamed. Peter sits there, stupidly staring at the scrap of paper in his hands. Jasper gave him a name. Gave him _his_ name. Names are important. 

“Well then,” he says, exchanging a quick look with his new wife, “Thank you. Brother.” 

One more piece clicks into place and the future of the four of them, happy and at peace, draws closer. Now if he could only find the girl. 

. 

Her name is Swan. 

He hears it called one night, like a friend calling out to a friend in the street, but there’s no-one there and he knows that word belongs with her golden eyes. 

Swan. Swan. Swan. 

Her name is Swan. 

.

But Swan is nowhere to be found and it’s hard to hold on to the tentative happiness of freedom over the stretch of years. 

Nomads still come to pick fights with the Warmaker, Maria still sends her messengers and spies out for them. Jasper’s still the Major half of the time, playing a game of tug’o war with himself over his body, his soul, his emotions. He’s unbalanced and filled with a self loathing that only grows with every human’s death he lives through. 

And there’s no Swan to fix him. 

Peter still plays his pranks and Charlotte hugs him with all of her considerable strength, but Jasper’s forgetting how to laugh again. 

. 

He stops feeding soon after, eyes growing dirty and dull. 

. 

Peter knows it’s Jasper calling before he answers the phone. They split for a few weeks, to get some space. Now Jazz is calling from a payphone in a diner in Philadelphia, telling him he’s found a girl. A girl who says there’s another way to feed. Another way to be. 

One where he doesn’t have to feel every death he causes. 

He says the girl’s name is Alice. She’s tiny, dark haired and beautiful. He wants to go with her. Peter wants to argue, wants to scream that this Alice is the wrong girl. Alice is the wrong name. Alice is going to pull him down into the rabbit hole and turn his world upside down but she’s not going to make him happy. 

But Alice sees the future and she sees Jasper with her. 

Well, Peter sees the future, too, sometimes, and he knows she’s not the right brunette. But he also knows that his brother’s mind is made up. Whatever he has to say, it will change nothing. Jasper’s path is set and try as he might, he can’t begrudge his maker the spark of hope he hears in his voice. 

Jasper has never sounded like that before. 

. 

It takes the fucker a decade to bring his wifey to visit his family. Peter, who sees them coming long before they arrive, is standing in the drive, yelling, “Yo, Whitlock!” as a greeting. 

He is summarily informed a moment later that Jasper’s last name is Cullen Hale now, thank you very much. Apparently, names don’t mean much to these people if they give them out like candy and throw them around like they come cheaper by the dozen. That does not endear them to the Whitlocks. 

Jasper just shrugs, so-so, and doesn’t say a word about it. Needless to say, Peter doesn’t like Alice and makes no secret of it. Neither does Charlotte. 

Alice doesn’t like the way Jasper is around them, crude and cold and always with an edge under the cashmere pullovers she buys him. Peter doesn’t know if she’s repulsed or just scared, but he does know that she’s trying to fix what isn’t hers to fix. 

Oh, she loves him and she means well, wouldn’t ever hurt Jasper, but she’s changing him. He relies on her flighty visions more than he ever did on Peter’s hunches and he’s become a follower instead of a leader. He doesn’t curse anymore, or wear jeans, or smack Char’s butt when she’s being a bitch. 

Alice thinks she’s helping him let go of his past, but she, the girl without a memory, doesn’t understand that you can never let go of it. You can never forget and erase. You can only move on. Every past day is a brick in the house of your life and you can’t just kick out the foundations and expect the rest to remain standing. 

Jasper is always going to remain the Warmaker, whether you call him Cullen, Hale or Whitlock. 

.

Lying in bed with Char curled against his side, Peter stares at the ceiling and watches Swan wrap her arms around his brother, pressing her face to his neck. “I love you, Major,” she says and she’s not afraid.

. 

Two months into the visit, the four of them run into a bunch of nomads on a little outing in the nearby nature reserve. The Cullens want to hunt and the Whitlocks want to poke fun at them. It’s almost like the old days, even with the pixie there. They’re all trying, for Jasper’s sake only. 

There are a dozen nomads, ten of them newborns. They’re headed south, to make their luck there. They think they can carve out territory for themselves in Texas or Mexico. Peter laughs out loud when the knowledge shoots into his head and once he shares it, so do Jasper and Charlotte. 

Automatically Jasper becomes the Major, stepping forward, taking control. “Get the hell out of here,” he warns, low and serious, pushing the appropriate amount of fear out with his words. 

The group titters and squirms a bit but they don’t move. 

“What are you gonna do?” one of the older ones asks. 

“Kill you,” the Major answers. 

Then it’s on. Peter and Charlotte wade in on either side of their Major, just like they always have, ripping off heads with little fuss. Alice is somewhere behind them, dealing with two of the newborns on her own. The Major takes the older ones, ripping an arm off at the first clash. 

They wise up, come at him in a pincer move and one of them manages to climb him like a monkey, ripping a chuck out of his shoulder with her fangs. He roars as he throws her off and then they’re dealing with the Warmaker. 

The female goes first, followed by her mate. He uses the severed head to stun one of the newborn ones long enough to decapitate him. Another one loses his arms and gets beaten into submission with them. Peter turns from the fight when there are only two newborns left, digging for his lighter, already kicking the heads together in the middle of a small clearing. Char brings her own spoils and they call for Alice to do the same. She doesn’t react, standing there, dumbstruck by the sight of her husband gleefully ripping apart the remaining newborns. 

He finishes the last one off almost leisurely and flings the head at Peter, who catches and dumps it in the pile. 

. 

They gather the scattered limbs, reattach the piece the bitch took out of Jasper and then set the pile on fire. 

“All pieces accounted for?” 

Alice, who hung back most of the time, wide-eyed, nods. Charlotte rolls her eyes and answers, precisely, as she was taught, “Yessir.” 

Anything more or less would result in missing limbs right now and she knows it. The Warmaker doesn’t really give a shit about friend or foe. He just kills what pisses him off. 

He nods and disappears into the trees without another word, undoubtedly to check the surrounding area. Alice makes to follow, but they stop her. 

“He’ll be back when he’s sane again,” Peter assures her, trying to sound kind. 

She bites her lip and looks away. Peter thinks she understands now that a killer by any other name will still rip your throat out if provoked. 

. 

After that little episode, Jasper stays away. He stays away from Peter and Charlotte, from his old haunts, his old ways and anything that might remind him. He buys into the Cullen way of life hook, line and sinker, trying to kick out his own foundations and build himself anew. 

Peter could tell him it doesn’t work that way, but Jasper isn’t talking to Peter and the only way they know what’s going on with their maker at all is through Peter’s knowing shit. 

Another ten years pass and then another and they pack up their things and go back to being nomads. They go back to New York and then to Boston and then they go wherever the wind carries them, eyes always peeled. 

For Swan. 

Peter figures they’re going to find her and then fling her at the Major and she’s going to make everything alright. Easy peasy. 

It’s the finding part that’s got them stumped. 

. 

It’s the late nineties when they bag themselves a rude and greedy little man who tried to rip them off over a used car. They drag him into an alley, hold his mouth shut for him and bend in practiced synchronism to drain him dry, when suddenly Charlotte stops.

“What about her?” She asks.

Peter, positively foaming at the mouth with hunger, licks the beady mean’s neck and asks, “What?”

“Swan,” his wife barks and he startles, lets the man go and straightens. The blood bag faints in terror. Pussy.

“What?”

“You said her eyes…” she wrings her hands, fumbling. Her eyes are golden. Veggie vampire, as Jasper’s merry band of misfits call it. Shit. They really don’t want to scare her away. Char’s been planning their girls’ nights out for the past thirty odd years. 

Peter sighs and kicks at their prey, eliciting a slight squeak. “We’re gonna have to make sure they’re actually guilty of more than pissing us off, won’t we?”

Charlotte looks down at their dinner with a look of acute loss on her face and nods. They both grimace. No innocents will probably mean supplementing their diet with wildlife. Blech.

He makes a gagging sound and she pats him on the back, expression sympathetic. Neither of them is keen on changing their diet but the thought of not doing it doesn’t occur to either of them for months.

By that time, their eyes are dirty orange and Peter has almost developed something akin to a maybe very slight liking for wolf blood. At least the fuckers put up a fight, unlike most humans. 

.

Jasper calls on a Monday and all Peter gets out of his ramblings is that he and Alice are over. He gives himself credit for not saying ‘finally’ out loud. 

Eventually he gets his old friend to take a deep breath and start again, this time somewhat coherent. There was a birthday party. With a human. Jasper almost ate her. The others were so disappointed. Peter figures that’s because eating the guest of honor is a no-go. 

They fought. Words were thrown because you can’t expect an empath to stand up to the bloodlust of seven vampires, but there’s no way to change it either. And he’s tired of being treated like an errant child, he says, when he’s the second oldest and most powerful of them all. 

Do this. Do that. Once upon a time, the Major ripped anyone who tried to order him around to pieces but somehow, somewhere down the line, he started marrying them and that could never end well. 

“You coming home?” Peter asks eventually, closing his eyes and trying to unknow what he already knows to be true. 

“No,” Jasper says. “Not yet. I have to… you know, don’t you, brother?” 

Find himself. Rediscover the man he was before the Cullens. Make himself different from what he was with Maria. Try to recapture the way he felt during those few first years of freedom. His own man. Yes, “I know.” 

“Tell Char I love her, alright? I’ll check in.” 

He never does. 

. 

The first time they hear whispers about a human seer helping out vampires, they laugh it off, rolling their eyes. For a race of immortal super predators, vampires sure like their gossip and wild rumors. 

Besides, humans with gifts are rare. Usually it takes death to unlock whatever latent abilities someone might have. Peter only ever got hunches before he died and Charlotte doesn’t remember having any special skill. They are both pretty sure that Jasper already messed with other people’s emotions before Maria got to him. 

So, ridiculous. 

But the rumor keeps floating their way and eventually someone has a name to offer. And that name is Swan. 

Peter is on the poor sucker like lightning, pinning him to the ground, hissing, “Where?” 

Detroit, he says, two months ago. 

. 

Old trails are harder to follow especially with modern transport, but not impossible. They go to Detroit and zigzag all over the East Coast, from Florida to the border and back, wondering what the hell drives this girl. 

But she stops and they don’t and eventually they catch up with her. In a supermarket of all places. She thinks they’re there to ask her something, silly girl.

After they make their introductions, Char holds out her hand and she studies it with eyes that are still brown, still human, before looking up at him. “Are you what I’ve been searching for?” 

She stands there, basket in hand, wearing worn jeans and a t-shirt, tired and lonely and alone, broken and crazy-glued back together and he can tell that she cares too much and shatters too easily and she’s… 

She’s perfect. 

“Yeah, baby girl,” he says and Char adds, “We’ve been searching for you, too, hon. For almost a hundred years.” 

That startles a laugh out of her. Then her breath hitches a bit as she bends, putting her basket on the floor, right there, in the middle of the aisle. She straightens up, smiles and takes Char’s hand without hesitation. 

Like he said, perfect. 

. 

They spend the night talking without saying a single word about their respective pasts. For now, the foundations of who they are stand silent and forgotten, ignored. They don’t need them. They trust that they will hold them and build on top of them, word for word, brick for brick.

They talk about their likes and dislikes, about where they’ve been and where they want to go. They laugh about Alphonse, the old nomad, the one that looks like Santa, and wonder who turned a man that old and wrinkly. 

Bella loves action movies, which makes Peter crow in delight and she likes romance novels, which makes Charlotte jump with joy. She dishes Peter’s shit right back to him with a small smile that almost splits her face in two and she never flinches away from Charlotte’s endless hugs.

She doesn’t mind being called ‘baby girl’, or ‘little sister’ and in return she gets to call Peter ‘Pete’. She says she still needs to find a proper nickname for Charlotte and they all smile because that is a plan and plans mean long term and long term means _not leaving_. The only name she doesn’t like much is ‘Swan’ and it’s hard not to use it after they only had that name to call her by for so long, but she says her Swan-days are over. 

.

The next morning it’s raining and Peter wants to just pack up her stuff and take off but she says she owes her boss to tell him goodbye. He’s always treated her well, she says, he’ll worry.

Well, duh. But Char joins Bella and they both give him constipated ‘dumb man’ looks and he caves. So they pack up her stuff, throw it in the trunk of her car and then drive to Malley’s where she worked – past tense. 

She tells her boss that she’s quitting and Peter pipes up from behind her that this is her two minute’s notice. Everyone smiles politely and he grins to himself while the human – BobbyB, really? – runs his eyes over both him, and Char. 

“You sure, sugar?” the old man asks.

Peter, impatient as always, answers for her, “Yes, she’s sure.”

Somehow, that doesn’t help. Bella rolls her eyes while Char smacks him. He winces, rubbing the spot even though there’s no pain. 

“Yes, I’m really sure, like he said.”

The old man still doesn’t look convinced and Peter thinks he should probably be grateful someone looked after their girl at least a bit, but really, she doesn’t need protection from _them_. 

She darts in close and hugs him goodbye, telling him to keep her last paycheck as an apology for dropping out like this. That’s the woman that’s going to fix the Major for them. Heart of gold, she has. Peter wraps an arm around her shoulders as soon as she lets her ex-boss go, steering her outside, eager to get on the road. He’s got Charlotte by the hand, tugging her along, too.

She looks past his chest at her new sister and says, “You don’t let this lump boss you around, got it, hon?”

Bella shrugs and nods, leaning her head into his shoulder. “I don’t mind,” she confesses, blushing a bit. And, damn, that blush of hers? If he could see her as food this would be the signal to start eating. “Maybe I will, in a while, but right now it’s just nice.”

“Aww,” he coos, reeling her in even more. “You like being bossed around by me. Hear that, Char. She likes it.”

This time they both smack him and he laughs, dancing away from them, mock wagging his finger in their faces before turning to Bella, instructing very slowly, “Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in.”

He figures he deserves the shoe she flings at him and stays still so it’ll actually hit him. They really have to work on her aim.

.

Their eyes are dirty orange and she knows that their diet is a mixed bag of guilty humans and innocent wildlife, but she never asks and they never tell. It’s sort of scary, how accepting this tiny little human is, how full of love. 

.

“Where to?” She asks an hour later, sitting behind the wheel of her crappy little jetta, looking at the two vampires lounging in her backseat, making out like teenagers.

Peter shrugs and lets Char answer for them both. “Home.”

.

They go back to the house, the one they bought in ’43 and spend their days fixing it up, getting into paint wars and hiding the nails from each other. He and Char have the silliest of contests, like who can punch a bigger hole into the rotten floor boards and she sits, watching them, giggling and clapping. 

She’s happy with them, just having them around. She’s happy because she feels what Peter feels and that is that they won’t leave her. 

She’s not alone anymore and they’ll never let her be lonely. 

She doesn’t care about their diet or their pasts or where they come from. To her, they are Peter and Charlotte and they are friends. Family, she says one night as Char tucks her in like a child. 

.

Peter thinks that maybe this is all a bit cliché, returning to the first place they were really happy in to rebuild their family now, sixty years later. To make it new and better and forever.

Full circle and crap like that isn’t really his style. Bella worries that she’s in the way, walking through the old rooms of the house, Jasper’s library, Char’s art stuff, Peter’s collection of junk. She thinks there’s not really room for her here and he has to hug her tight enough to make her ribs creak and tells her that this is _right_ before she’ll believe him.

She’s sorry, she says, but she doesn’t know as much as she used to and it scares her a bit. She’s gotten used to relying on her hunches.

They promise to help her figure out how her gift works exactly and she brightens. With every promise they make, she believes a bit more. Peter wonders who screwed her over so badly, but he hasn’t dared ask yet. There is a scar on her wrist that tells its own story and only one Coven in this world that would have saved an infected girl instead of letting her turn. 

Maybe there’s more to this whole full circle thing than he believed in the beginning. 

. 

They heal. Somehow, between fixing the house, hunting, entertaining each other with stories and catching up on lost time, they heal. Sometimes it’s hard for Peter to balance his roles as court jester and oracle at the same time, but he makes his girls feel happy and safe and that’s really all that matters. With every joke, promise, reassurance, they heal.

Battle scars and nightmares, loneliness and abandonment, they heal. They laugh as much as they laughed those first few years with Jasper. 

Jasper. That reminds him. 

He tucks her tighter under his arm and asks, a bit worried, “You know that we’ll turn you, don’t you?” 

She nods. “I know. But not yet. Someone’s missing.” 

She knows it, too. Char, sitting on the other sofa, rolls her eyes. Sometimes she gets lost in their conversations because she doesn’t know shit like they do. 

“Our maker,” he explains. “It’s gotta be him. Then everything’s the way it’s supposed to be.” 

Bound by venom, all four of them, together for good. He can already see the trouble they’re going to get into. He grins at his wife and she laughs out loud because she knows that glint in his eyes. And their baby girl laughs right alongside them. 

. 

It’s Charlotte who figures out that baby girl loves to dance but is afraid to because she thinks she’s clumsy. It’s Peter who points out that she may have been, once upon a time, before she grew into her body and started to earn her living balancing trays filled with drinks, but she’s certainly not now. 

So they take her dancing. 

Char stuffs her into a slutty red dress and Peter sighs because he definitely needs a bigger stick with those two surrounded by drunk human males. As soon as they get there, Char drags her little sister onto the dance floor, teaching her how to sway just right and Peter bites his lip and groans because, seriously, have you seen those two? He knows he’s going to take one of them to bed tonight and he knows that he wouldn’t kick the other one out just either. Bella may be Jasper’s, but Jasper isn’t there yet, is he?

He gets them all shots, fully intending to make the only human drink them all. That is until she confesses to never having been drunk before. Okay, so he still intends to make her drink them all now, but he won’t push her. She bravely downs the first, grimaces and makes gagging noises into Char’s shoulder before reaching for the second and then the third.

By midnight, she’s up to seven and he kind of wishes he were the empath in the family because you could probably power a small Midwestern town with all the giddy she’s giving off. Char puts her on a water diet, laughing, and Bella drags him out on the dance floor with them, giggling like crazy. 

He’s the stud of the evening, what with the two hottest women in the place grinding against him. Bella stumbles eventually, landing against his chest, wrapping her arms around his neck, staring at him with glassy eyes. “I’m drunk,” she tells him, very seriously.

Girl’s a riot. “No shit, baby girl.”

She smiles, bright and lopsided. “I love when you call me that.”

“Yeah?” Char’s pressing against his back, watching from around his shoulder.

Bella nods. “Love you, too, Petey.”

And then she stands on tiptoe and presses her lips against his cold ones. He stiffens for a split second before his vampire brain catches on, but then she’s already gone, flinging herself at his wife, who catches her, despite being a good few inches shorter. “Love you, too, Cha-cha.”

Peter knew that those two kissing would be hot, but it’s _hot_.

He steps closer, putting one hand on Bella’s waist, and leans in to say something when she barfs over Charlotte’s shoulder.

.

An hour later Charlotte has her cleaned up and in pajamas and Peter tucks her in like the kid he’s pretty sure she never was. He kisses her forehead and she grumbles in her sleep.

“We love you, too, baby girl.”

.

Jasper comes one day in early November, a few months after they picked her up in a supermarket. 

Peter and Bella both see him coming but he makes it to the door first, throwing it open and wrapping his arms around his brother. “Took you long enough, asshole!” he crows as Jasper hugs back tightly. 

He snorts. “I know, sorry. I had to get a few things straightened out first.” He lets go of Peter, slapping him on the back once. “But I’m home now.” 

Then he stops and his nostrils flare as he catches a scent he didn’t expect and…

Bella curls her arms around Peter’s waist from behind, standing on tiptoes to rest her chin on his shoulder. She smiles and answers, “Yes, you are.” 

. 

Whitlock. 

That’s the only name that really matters. 

.


	3. Tides

.

**Tides**

.

When he is eight, Yolanda takes him with her to the market. Mitzy, the other maid, is busy with the twins, barely three weeks old, and his mother is sick. Dying, but he doesn’t know that yet. He causes all kinds of mischief if left alone and so Yolanda sees no other option than to take Young Master to the market with her. 

He flits around the stalls and huts, cuts grimaces at other children, enjoys shoving people out of the way and generally makes a nuisance of himself, knowing perfectly well that none of the people around, all of them black, will dare raise a hand against him. He deserves to be smacked, but they won’t do it. 

Until, out of nowhere, a wrinkly hand clamps around his forearm, stopping him dead. He spins around to face his attacker and is surprised to find her not much taller than him. Her skin looks like burnt paper, all wrinkled and dark, grey like ashes in places. Her eyes are milky white and her teeth rotting in her mouth. She scares him. Scares him so badly that he forgets to scream and demand she be punished for her transgression.

“Oh, boy,” she rasps, pulling him closer, laying her smelly hands on his face, tracing his features. He’s frozen stiff in fear. “You be nasty, boy,” she mutters, more to herself than him. “You be makin’ war, boy. You be dead, boy, and you be makin’ war, makin’ blood, makin’ pain, oh, oh…,” and then, while he’s still staring at her like she’s all his nightmares come to life, she switches languages and her words become a garbled mess.

A moment later, Yolanda, wide-eyed and panting, pulls him away from the old woman and drags him through alleys and side-streets until he thinks his heart’s going to burst. He rips away from her and demands, “Who was that?”

Yolli shakes her head, eyes on the ground. “No-one, Master. Crazy woman.”

“What did she say?” He wants, no, needs to know. Needs to know what she said. War? Blood? To an eight-year-old boy, it sounds like glory and magic. 

Yolanda shakes her head again, refusing to answer. He considers her for a moment before saying, low and dangerous, his best imitation of his father, “You tell me right now or I’ll tell Father Mitzy stole food.”

Mitzy is Yolanda’s sister and thus the threat to her much better. He’s smart and he’s cunning and he’s doesn’t hesitate to use it. 

The maid shuffles her feet, kicking up dust. She wrings her hands and refuses to meet his eyes. Even through the threat of a whipping for her sister, she still hesitates. Then, quietly, sacredly, she interprets the woman’s garbled words. “She say you bring only death.”

.

He’s seventeen and he’s going to war. The twins are scampering around him, like eager dogs, Maddie crying, Jamie cheering him on. He bends to hug his sister and then catches his brother by the collar and hugs him, too. His father stands next to them, watching his oldest with a mixture of pride and trepidation.

They fought, long and hard about this. About Jasper being too young. Another year, Father said. The war might be over then, Jasper said, eager for glory. Jasper won.

Mitzy appears suddenly and quietly, herding the twins away and he’s about to try and find the words that might be the last to his father, when Yolanda comes rushing out of the house. She slows when she catches sight of him, sighs in relief. 

His father, never a man of many words, sighs and pats him on the shoulder. “Come home son,” he rumbles, hauling him in for a rare and valued kiss to the forehead. Then he spins on his heel, marching back towards the house. “Girl,” he barks at Yolanda, “I’m hungry.”

The maid nods and clasps her hands in front of her stomach but makes no move to follow the master. Instead she risks a look at Jasper, who’s long since grown way beyond her. She steps closer and hesitantly holds out her hands. He starts, surprised. Yolanda has not touched him voluntarily since the day at the market, the day the blind woman named him a bringer of death.

He watches her half-aborted gesture, unwilling to either help or hinder, simply waiting. He’s grown a bit more patient in the past decade. 

In the end, the aging woman curses under her breath and flings her arms around his middle, the only part of him she can comfortably reach. “I hope she been wrong,” she whispers.

She doesn’t explain who ‘she’ is. 

He hugs her back for a moment before pushing her away, older, but still so young. Still so cocky. “I don’t,” he returns, his grin sharp. He’s going to bring death, alright, to any Yankee he finds. 

Yolanda pats his arm one last time before turning away. The last thing she ever says to him is, “I pray for you, Master.”

It doesn’t help much.

.

The first man he ever kills isn’t much older than him, blonde and tall. A scout for the Yankees. The enemy. A hostile soldier. A danger. A human. A man. Just a man.

He shoots him and then finishes the job with a knife, feeling warm blood on his hands. It makes him gag, makes him retch. But he keeps his food down, cleans his blade, and gets a pat on the shoulder from his commanding officer. 

He breathes in and breathes out and tries to calm his racing heart and he can’t help the feeling in his chest, the one that says, _you were born for this_.

.

And he was. Up and up and up, youngest Major in the Texas Cavalry, Major Whitlock, the man you can’t beat.

And then three women on the shoulder of the road, admiring his body and his prowess on the battle field. Admiring his capacity for death.

He was born for this. 

He dies for it, too.

.

He wakes with foreign emotions and fire on his tongue. He feeds on blood and death. He twists people’s hearts until they break and fills them with something new, with rage, or hunger, or hate and lets them loose on the world. 

He takes their lives, uses them to cause more death and then takes their unlives, too, and before long, his calling is turned and shortened and the one who makes war becomes, quite simply, the Warmaker. 

.

The thing with Maria doesn’t start because Maria has no end and no beginning. She, along with everything she brings, is a state of being, an entire universe in itself. Maria, Maria, Maria. For the longest time, she’s all he knows.

Maria and the Southern Wars are pain, rage, thirst, pleasure, fear, desire, lust, hate, hunger, wrath and rage. They are death and murder and injury, blood and fire and the blackness of hearts that have forgotten that they ever knew purity.

He is an empath immersed in an ocean of negative feelings, filled to capacity and beyond with the thirst and rage of everyone around him. He knows, intellectually, that he must have been different once, must have been alone in his skin once. 

But all he is now is other people’s filth crammed into him without beginning or end. He’s part of the darkness around him, blending seamlessly. He’s hate given form and it’s only late at night, when there is no-one around and some of the army’s collective base desires seep away in the solitude, that he can look down at his hands and see the blood on them. But they were bloody before and while he understands what he is, in those small hours of morning, he feels no regret. He brings death. It’s always been this way.

He kills aimlessly and planlessly. Maria teases him, fills him with all her perversion and endless hunger and when he snaps, when his eyes turn to pitch, she lets him loose like an animal and he goes, soaking up all the pain and death he causes, using it to fuel himself. He can go on like this forever. Soaking up and spewing back into the world. As long as there are things – people – to kill, he can keep killing them. 

Maria doesn’t start because Maria is always.

.

One day a party of Volturi guards visit them to inspect what they’re doing. Jane and Alec are with them and Maria, flighty bitch that she is, falls in love with them, their powers and their potential. She tries to get them to stay, but they refuse.

So she sends him out to get her gifted twins of her own. She doesn’t care what it takes, she tells him, and this time no amount of artificial emotion will deter her. He sighs and goes to find her twins.

He searches one town after another, looking for twins with that certain strangeness, that glow of otherness around them. Gifted. Of course they’d have to be gifted, too. And young. Because Maria wants her own Jane and Alec. 

He finds himself a pair one night, sitting in a field, whispering to each other, both blonde and pretty, a boy and a girl. For a moment his dead heart leaps and another vision interferes with the one before him. Two children, boy and girl, blonde, too. The girl’s hair is longer, their clothes different. 

Maddie. Jamie.

How old are they now? Are they alive? Are they gifted?

He stops himself, frowning. Gifted? Why would he care? Would he… he considers the question. Would he kill them if they were? Death for the twins. Death for his twins, those twins, any twins. 

Could he? Can he?

He watches the boy help the girl up and dust her off. They link arms and walk away, none the wiser. For the first time in his life, Jasper Whitlock doubts.

.

One day a lanky, blonde soldier is brought into the camp for the simple reason that he was close and wore a uniform. Maria has always had a special craving for soldiers and the only reason she hasn’t sent him out to turn her a whole battalion of them is her fear of discovery, something he conveniently planted in her when it became clear that she doesn’t have enough common sense to do it herself. It amuses him sometimes, how she can watch him fuck with people’s heads all day and night long and never even consider that he’s doing the same to her. 

She taught him how to be the monster. She never taught him how to switch it off.

They dump the soldier in his tent, where he decides whether to eat or kill him. 

It’s his choice, most of the time. Sometimes Maria gives orders, but she’s no general, so the running of the army is his concern. Eat or kill. She calls him her dark god, presiding over the fates of man.

The man struggles, tries to get away, to move, to fight. He douses him with a calm so heavy, it turns his limbs to lead and decides to keep him. This one has spunk. He needs some of that because Lord knows, he’s surrounded by idiots. And half the time he needs to keep one eye on his mistress, too, lest she let her sisters plant something too crazy in her head and gets them all killed.

He turns the man swiftly and lets the guards take him away, unwilling to burden himself with three days of burning pain bouncing around his skull. His own was enough, thank you very much.

He goes to Maria to inform her that she’ll have a new toy soldier to play with soon and she is pleased. He soaks up the feeling, turns it to pleasure and sends it back until she’s panting like a bitch in heat, clawing at his clothes, begging him to give her release.

He kisses her hard, bites her lip and then walks out. He calls her mistress, but she does not rule him. He likes to remind her of that.

.

He has them bring the soldier back when the burning is coming to an end and he sends the guards out, wanting to inspect this one for himself first. He doesn’t know why and doesn’t question it.

He simply sits on the man’s chest as he breathes his last and his heart goes still forever. He leans over his face, waiting. A moment later glowing red eyes meet his own and confusion, shock, fear and delight flood him.

.

Peter isn’t like other newborns. He feels the rage and the thirst, but he works through them, rises above them. He feels more than the usual selection of emotions.

He feels things like amusement, joy, hope, companionship and friendship. Occasionally, a totally out of place emotion will spike in him for no reason at all and his eyes will go glassy for just a second. 

Peter’s emotions are so alien that it takes Jasper a while to decode them, to understand them. He doesn’t remember them. But they are there, tiny pinpricks of light that pierce the dark blanket of emotion that lies over the camp, suffocating him. 

Peter admires him as much as he fears him and in-between, he feels kinship, friendship. He feels, in the middle of all this shit, contentment. Jasper doesn’t know where he takes these emotions from, has his own theories about the man’s frequent split-second black-outs followed by bursts of happiness, but he never voices them because suddenly his world gains texture, gains contrast.

Maria ceases to be a state of being and becomes instead only one side of a coin. The dark one.

.

He takes everything he learns from Peter and he drinks it down like fresh blood, guzzles it like he’ll never get another drop. And he saves it.

The next time Maria starves and tortures him to the point of releasing the Warmaker, he settles inside his mind, wrapping himself in tiny scraps of positive emotion and simply waits out the rage. 

If he were a man prone to philosophize, he would mark this moment to be the birth of choice. 

.

Since he never finds her any twins, Maria starts sending out others to bring her children. Apparently, the desire to have her own mini-Volturi has not faded. She turns the children herself, killing most of them. Those that survive have no gifts because he is the one that finds the gifted. No other recognizes them. 

He is the one that disposes of the small corpses, the one that oversees their one and only march – to the dumps. They are so tiny, so young. He feels sick. He’s never felt that way before. 

He tries to get her to stop, but she won’t. So he goes out and finds her a pair of goddamn gifted twins and makes sure they turn properly. Their names are Adam and Sophie and he doesn’t drink a drop of their blood, disgusted with himself. 

Peter watches, his eyes cold and hard for once. “They are children,” he says afterwards, as their convulsing bodies are carried away.

“They are the last,” he counters, calmly wiping venom off his chin while inside, he’s shaking. Maria will have her twins now and no more children will die. The smaller of two evils. 

“They’re gonna be her pets,” Peter spits, forgetting his place. 

Jasper glowers at him, eyes dark as he backhands the other man harshly across the face. “I bring death,” he growls.

It’s a curse, all of a sudden and he hates Peter for making it that way. 

.

The first time Peter calls him Jasper, it’s been sixty years since he heard that name on someone else’s lips. Maria has a slew of petnames for him and the rest of the world fears him too much to call him that.

Jasper. 

He remembers Jasper. He was a blonde boy from a small town, with a beating heart and an easy smile. He was the kind of person that stopped to help three women stranded on the road. He was young, brave, cocky, arrogant, dumb, naïve and terribly willing to believe in people, even after years of war. A killer, a soldier, but never jaded. He was human, in every sense of the word.

Hearing someone call him by that dead boy’s name rattles him right down to his bones. From the look on his face and the fear pouring from him, Peter expects death to be his punishment.

It’s not. All he does is bring the tent down on the man and make him run newborn duties for a month. Peter thinks he does it out of anger, but really, he’s too scared to look the other man in the eye. Afraid of what he’ll find reflected back at him in red-hued irises. 

It’s not until later, much later, that he even wonders how Peter knows that name in the first place. 

.

After that, he finds himself protecting Peter like he’s never protected anyone. He finds it impossible to stay away from the man for too long. He needs the light, the warmth, the willing love that Peter emanates. He needs the hope.

He needs the man’s wit and his sharp eye, he needs his new names for Maria, needs his jokes and stories. 

He protects him because if Peter gets killed, then Jasper will die with him and all that will be left will be the Warmaker. For good this time. He’ll forget again, that there is more to life than war, and he’ll lose himself in the blood and never resurface.

Peter is his lifeline. 

.

Peter also knows more than he’s letting the fuck on. Like Jasper’s name. Battle tactics, things not yet past, or things long gone. 

His eyes go blank for a split second and his feelings reel and then he’s back, smug smirk or worried look on his face. 

He knows things. Jasper’s not dumb enough to tell Maria, but he’s not above using that little gift for himself. Using it to keep the two of them alive. Peter may not share what he knows, but his emotions tell enough. Enough to nudge Maria when need be, enough to draw out a march, tweak a plan. 

“Do you think things will change one day?” he asks one night, as vaguely as he possibly can, refusing to meet the younger vampire’s eyes.

Peter frowns and then tilts his head to the side, obviously not understanding the hint he’s being given. “They’ll get better,” he muses eventually, his answer as carefully neutral as can be.

But to Jasper, who’s mostly figured the other man out, these three words mean the world. 

.

Peter’s one year mark comes and goes and he lives because Jasper makes it so. He twists Maria’s emotions until she’s dry sobbing on the floor and then sweetly tells her that he needs the other soldier.

She consents because she fears him as much as she loves him and for the first time, he’s disgusted with what he’s done to the bitch.

For the first time, he thinks that maybe there is something else besides this. Better.

.

Time passes. Charlotte comes and Peter’s emotions go haywire the same way they do when he zones out. He knows the girl and what he feels for her is overwhelming. Jasper motions for her to be brought into his tent and lays her, and her future, at Peter’s feet.

Eat or keep. 

From the look on the man’s face, the bright, panicked swirl of his emotions, he understands that Jasper knows. He understands that this is a test.

He picks Charlotte and neither of them knows whether he just passed or failed.

.

He pretends not to see and not to hear during Charlotte’s newborn year. He pretends it doesn’t tear at the last soft spot inside of him how Peter turns away from him in shame. In fear.

Does he really think he’s hiding his love from the empath? Really?

And then her year runs out and they stand at the edge of the dumps, alone. Charlotte cowers in fear and some part of his rejoices because at least she remembers how things are supposed to be. Warmaker. None dare disobey him.

Except Peter.

And for that he loves him. 

Loves him, even as he crouches, ready to attack. He picks his mate over his friend and the light fades as the rage and the hate creep back in, flooding him like black rain. 

Betrayal tastes like fire, not ashes, and it burns in his throat like the thirst does. Peter begs and the Warmaker howls inside, wanting nothing more than Charlotte’s limbs scattered across the desert. This man, this Peterfriendcompanion, he belongs to the Warmaker, the only equal, the only one worthy in a century of war.

“Go,” he snarls with the last of his sanity, the last of the boy that Peter woke with his magic incantation of ‘Jasper’. Maria was right. War is all he’s good for, all anyone can use him for. 

He turns and walks away before Peter can walk away from him. He hears a quiet thank you on the wind and doesn’t turn. Whatever it was that Peter brought with him, whatever it meant, it ends now. 

.

But try as he might, even though he lets the darkness back in, but he can’t wash away the memory of other things. Better things. They refuse to die, these monsters by the name of choice and hope and friendship. 

They refuse to leave him to his war and his blood. 

.

And then they come back. 

.

They ask him where he wants to go, make suggestions, name places and things and he’s overwhelmed with choice. 

He can go wherever he wants, do whatever he pleases. He’s his own master. They show him New York and teach him Peter’s dime game and he’s grateful, because these things take some of the choices away from him so he can breathe again.

But there’s still so much. He loves sitting in the crowded squares and restaurants, soaking up the hustle and bustle of mortals. They are happy, hurried, lazy, joyful, sad, angry, frustrated, tired, exhausted, elated, disappointed, surprised, content, worried, distracted.

The tides of emotions swamping him are overwhelming because there’s so much of so many different emotions. Some take months to decode because he can’t remember ever having felt them before. Others he recognizes like old friends. 

At times he’s almost sure that vampires can, in fact, get headaches but every time Peter asks him why he keeps going out to get flooded, he just shrugs and has no words to say, ‘because there is no death, no panic, no fear, no hate in these people. Because the tenor of their emotions is light yellows and mild. Because with every tide that washes through me, more of Maria gets washed out.’

New York’s millions clean him up, one emotion at a time. 

.

Except when he’s killing them. 

In the total emotional chaos of the army, he never noticed a single death but now, out in the world, he feels himself dying with every man he sucks dry.

He tries to flood them with positive emotions, with calm, with acceptance, but the lizard brain fear underneath always remains and it tastes like ashes and dirt in his mouth. It tastes like Maria’s kisses, open-mouthed and full of teeth, used to.

Tastes like the old woman’s words from Yolanda’s lips, words he never forgot, even through a century of war and three days of burning. He brings only death. 

Warmaker.

Deathbringer.

He was born for this.

He wishes he could forget all he was.

.

After five years, he’s still not sure about his place with Charlotte. He loves her, simply because she loves Peter and came back for him, but he has no idea what to make of the emotions she has for him.

Sometimes, out of reflex, she still calls him Major and they both flinch before she’s flooded with guilt and he follows suit. He remembers her on the training fields, short and fast, but weaker than most. He pushed her to her breaking point and beyond more than once.

He’d like to say he did it so she would survive, for Peter, but that would be a lie. He did it because that’s what the Warmaker did. He drove people to their limits and if they broke, he got rid of them. If they pulled through, he kept pushing until they didn’t. Nothing but meat with teeth and claws to be used. The only ones he ever went easy on, the _only ones_ were Adam and Sophie, and that was simply because they were only ever meant as ornaments, as bookends for Maria, their pretty, tiny, personal shields. 

Peter tells him about Charlotte’s ability one day and he finds himself wondering what she sees in him for months, before simply asking the question.

She frowns, head cocked to one side. “Does it matter?” she wants to know. He nods.

“I didn’t see anything back when we first ran. It was like there was a cloud around you, black and heavy. It was choking you. I had no idea which parts of that mess were you, if any. It got better after we got away. Lighter. There are more colors now but, Jasper, I still can’t tell what’s you and what isn’t.”

She shrugs and looks away, ashamed for some reason he can’t fathom. “I’m sorry,” she adds and he finds himself laughing.

“For what?” he asks. “You’re not the one that fucked me up.”

She shakes her head, glaring. “Jasper Whitlock,” she snarls, “Don’t you dare speak of yourself that way. You have a gift. Maria used that gift ruthlessly. That does not make you fucked up. It just makes you another victim of her insane little scheme for world domination. Do I make myself clear?!”

She stands there, hands on her hips, fire in her eyes. She usually only looks at Peter like that when he’s just barely survived another one of his suicidal, mad schemes. And then she remembers who she’s talking to and a spike of fear shoots through her and Jasper wants to beat himself up. He takes a step forward, ridiculously grateful when she doesn’t back away and pulls her into his arms harshly, pressing his face in her hair. “I love you,” he says before he can think about it and her fear melts away, turning into fuzzy orange happiness and love.

She puts her arms around his waist, lays her head on his chest and holds him as he bathes her in waves of gratitude.

.

He hates fighting.

Or rather, he hates that he doesn’t hate fighting.

Even as a human, it was his passion. Movements, plans, a perfect execution and victory. That was what he was good at, what he lived for. He was a damn fine soldier.

And then Maria took that from him and twisted it, used his head for strategy and his love for battle to bring terror to the masses. He remembers perfectly the first time she woke the Warmaker. She had him work out a plan of attack on an enemy camp. For a week, she made him plan and replan, work out alternatives and eventualities. He showed her the final result on a map, drawing a finger down from the north directly into the center of the camp. “Send the fighting force in here, through there,” he said. 

She nodded and had him put in chains. No blood for two weeks, no fighting, no release of any kind. She drove him to the brink of insanity and laughed while she did it, her hands on his body, her words and tongue in his ear, flooding him with every particle of hate and thirst she had in her. 

When the time for the attack came she had him brought to the rallying point and unchained. She turned him toward the camp and pointed. “In here,” she said, “Through there. There’s blood waiting for you on the other side, my dear.”

And then she let him loose.

He brought death.

.

He still has to fight now and he loves it and hates himself for it. He feels guilt for every dead man, woman and child he leaves behind, but never regret, and hates himself for that, too. He should feel regret so deep, so tall, it should be overwhelming. But he can’t. Guilt, yes, oceans and mountains of it, but never regret. He is what he is. Other vampires come to fight him, come to see him. Come to beat the Warmaker, even though none ever come close enough to even attempt it.

And he falls back into old patterns like he never stopped, Peter and Charlotte at his flanks, his wingmen, his soldiers. 

They call him Major in those situations and he never flinches because then and there, that is what he is. 

The hate comes later and he uses it to wash out the death screams of those stupid enough to wake the beast.

.

When he leaves them there is no surprise in their eyes. They know. Have known. 

Somewhere out there, there is something waiting for him, a something he needs. A reason. He needs to find it and they love him enough to let him go. 

“Philadelphia,” Peter says after his last goodbye and Jasper listens because it’s as good a direction as any. He feels his brother’s apprehension in that one word, his worry, his chagrin, his hope. Something’s waiting for him in Philadelphia and judging from his brother’s emotions, it’s a mixed blessing. Charlotte simply kisses his forehead and lets him go.

.

Her name is Alice and she offers everything he’s looking for on a silver platter. No more fighting. No more war, no more death throes of other people to choke him in a flashflood of emotion.

Peace, she says, animals. Love, family. No fighting. No death.

She has him at ‘peace’.

.

The Cullens are strange. They feel love, compassion, hope, joy, desire. Any dark impulses their animal sides throw at them they hide, deep down and out of sight. They celebrate the human and shy away from the monster. 

It’s the exact opposite of anything Maria ever did and that makes it attractive for him, makes him crave it. A new beginning. He accepts Rose’s name as his own, marries Alice, bathes himself in all the humanity they offer so freely. 

It’s not until his first slip up that he realizes that hiding away the dark parts isn’t any better than hiding away the light ones. Shoving them into a corner doesn’t make the urges, the impulses go away. The Deathbringer and the Warmaker are still there. They just changed out of a wolf’s skin into a sheep’s coat.

.

He sees the girl in the street and Emmett stiffens beside him as the wind turns, inhaling her scent. Alice follows a split second later, eyes wide, fighting to hold her breath. He, the empath, finds himself fifty - a hundred - years in the past, Maria behind him, an army of bloodthirsty newborns around him and a village full of fresh, pumping human blood in front of him.

The hunger – foreign and his own – fills him and he strikes. The girl never even sees him coming and he carries his red eyes as a flag of his shame for the next months. At least, that’s what they say. All he knows is that he killed a human. A single human. Sure, she didn’t deserve it, but she was only one and he’s done so much worse. Guilt again, but no regret because what’s done is done. He’s a soldier, pragmatic to the bone.

Edward sees inside his mind, sees some of the horrors hidden there, but even he doesn’t understand that Jasper isn’t like them. It’s not disgust that made him switch to animals. It was the offer of not having to feel his victims’ deaths anymore. 

Peter once said he eats what he eats and that he does it because it’s his choice. “And if I want to live off of rats, that’s my damn choice, too.”

Jasper chose animals because he is free now, free to choose and he wants peace. He is sorry for killing the girl, but not nearly as horrified at his own actions as his family seems to be. He’s seen far worse.

They, apparently, haven’t.

.

After that, the whispers start. Jasper can’t go there. Jasper can’t do that. Don’t leave Jasper alone. Alice constantly scans his future for another slip and Edward monitors him like he’s a newborn instead of a feared warlord. 

They move often because of him, tell him where to go and who to stay away from. Their worry and their sadness starts to fill him up like Maria’s thirst, desire and lust once did and he thinks, one night, that if Charlotte could see him now, she wouldn’t be able to find him underneath it all. Again.

He needs to get away.

.

He packs up his wife and their things, tells the family goodbye and ships them towards the other end of the rubber band in his chest that ties him to his childer. Peter greets him like he was never gone, Charlotte hugs him like he’s a lifeline and Alice stands behind, awkwardly, trying to be nice to his family while her skin crawls with the desire to look away from their red gazes.

It gets better over time and he thinks things are almost good, when they’re attacked on a hunt and he slips, as he must, back into Major mode.

By the time he comes back out of it, the fear never quite leaves Alice. She’s scared of him. Of what he is, what he was. What he can do. They fight and he raises his hand to run it through his hair and she flinches away from him, afraid he’ll hit her.

As if he ever would. As if he has so little control. 

As if, as if. As if a killer is all he is. He wishes he’d listened to Yolli.

Alice loves him, loves him like he hung the moon for her, but, he learns, she doesn’t trust him. She starts, slowly, to try to make him into someone she can trust. She scouts ahead, tells him how and when and where, gets a grip on his life that she could never get on him, on Jasper. She controls everything she can in order to be able to ignore what she knows is uncontrollable about him.

She makes Jasper who she needs him to be to stand between her and the Warmaker.

Out of guilt and love, he lets her. 

.

For fifty whole years, he lets her. He let Maria, too. Funny, how two women who want opposite things from him, still employ the same methods to get them.

Not that he’s comparing Alice to Maria. He’s not. She’s not. They’re nothing alike. One hard, the other soft, one cold, the other warm, one ruthless, the other full of compassion. 

They only have one thing in common. 

They love to recreate him in their image.

.

And then: Forks. 

.

Bella looks at them and _sees_ them. She sees their changing eyes, their strange behavior, the hunger in their gazes. She sees the monsters under their skin. 

And instead of running, she crawls right in under the wire. 

Rosalie shakes her head, saying there must be something wrong with a human that understands the danger they present and feels no fear. He tends to agree.

But he learns, over the months, that that is what Bella is. 

Acceptance. Love. Forgiveness for anything and anyone. 

“ _The world was never meant for one as beautiful as you_ ,” he quotes one evening after Edward takes her home, almost absentmindedly whispering the words. Alice, sitting beside him, gives him a long look before averting her gaze. 

.

Trying to bite her is the single most heinous act he has committed in all his existence. Thousands slaughtered, countless nameless dead, armies razed to the ground, none of it plagues him the way one single drop of blood and a lunge do.

And this time, it’s not even his fault. Edward, the idiot, flings her into a stack of glass plates, turning one drop into an ocean and then the bloodlust of all six other vampires hits him and for a moment she’s not just Edward’s singer, but Jasper’s, multiplied a thousand times. 

He really, really, really can’t be blamed for this one.

But he blames himself because Isabella Swan is balm for the soul and to destroy that light, to take that goodness out of the world is one stain he does not want on his tattered soul.

So he leaves. The second Emmett releases him, the second Alice turns her eyes and sight from him in grief, he turns and runs. Rose and Esme try to follow and he smacks them both in the face with crippling riptides of pleasure.

Not pain, because he’s not that person anymore, but pleasure enough to send them to their knees. He tastes their shock on the air and it mingles with Alice’s fear, a fear that stems from the knowledge that if he hadn’t _allowed_ Emmett to drag him away, even in his blind hunger, they would all be dead by now, dead for standing in the Warmaker’s way. 

So this, he muses, is regret.

.

By the time he returns to the house, there is nothing waiting for him except a note, telling him they’re in Alaska. Asking him to follow them, please, in Esme’s handwriting. 

He does, staying just long enough to grab his things and kiss Alice goodbye. All angry words have been said, their marriage was never legal, so there need be no divorce. He can simply burn his papers, killing Jasper Hale in flame. Becoming a Whitlock again will be a piece of cake. He has it all planned out by the time he packs the last of his clothes, Alice sitting on their shared bed, the rest of the family hovering in the doorway. 

“Don’t go,” his wife asks and her voice says she already knows he won’t listen. They fought last night when he arrived and Alice seems bled out for the first time since he met her.

He shakes his head. “I have to, Ali, you know that.”

She shakes her head, too, stubborn glint in her eye. “No. You belong with us. With me.”

He tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. He loves her, he really does. She gave him all he asked for, all he dreamed of. It just took him a long time to realize that what he dreamed off wasn’t what he needed. Alice tries to change him with every pair of pants she buys for him and he wanted to change for her, for so long. He wanted to become a lamb as much as she wanted him to be one.

But he’s a wolf.

“You can lock the monster away, but you can’t take its teeth and claws,” he tells her. Rose snorts in the doorway, disgusted by his melodramatic words. He knows he sounds like Edward but he can’t help it. He’s the Major. He always will be. With Peter and Charlotte, being himself, a wolf as a wolf, that’s okay. But with the Cullens he pretends to be something he’s not until he believes it, too, and an innocent girl almost has to die. 

Time to stop running. Beginnings, endings. It started in Philadelphia and it ended when it almost cost Bella everything.

“I’m a monster, darlin’,” he whispers, “With teeth and claws and I don’t fit in this family. I never have.”

Alice nods, small and sad, looking more like a child than ever. He presses a gentle kiss to her forehead and turns to go. The family parts before him, Esme sobbing, everyone else solemn. Emmett meets his gaze and when he finds only resolve, he steps out of the way, letting Jasper go. For a goofball, he’s sometimes the smartest of them all. Rose looks between her husband and brother and then nods to herself and follows Emmett’s lead. He loves them for that.

“Son,” Carlisle calls after him. He stops and sighs because this is the problem. He’s the second oldest of them all, the one that has seen the most. He isn’t anyone’s son but he’s always being treated like the wayward youngest child. The troublemaker. The sullen victim. “It’s a choice. You just have to make it.”

Decide against the blood, against the Major and the memory of a hundred years of war that were stifling, but not all bad. He hates that he doesn’t hate fighting but he can’t change it. War is a part of him. He’s the Warmaker. He’s never truly regretted that. Many things about it, yes. Maria. All those innocent lives. But the battle itself, the fever pitch of fighting? Never that.

He’s meant to take lives, always has been. He isn’t arrogant enough, stupid enough anymore to think killing is a good thing, but that doesn’t change what the blind woman saw in him that day at the market.

Maybe that’s why he doesn’t fit in with these people. He doesn’t hate himself enough to deny everything he is. 

“I know,” he tells Carlisle without looking back. “I made it.”

It’s not the choice they would have made for him but he learned after Maria to never let anyone decide for him. His choice. His eternity. 

He chose to walk away from his creator. He chooses now to walk away from his wife and family. 

Endings and beginnings. 

He can’t quite help the smile on his face as he shuts the front door behind himself. 

.

He calls Peter as soon as he replaces the cell phone that got crushed somewhere between Forks and Alaska, promises to check in, tells them he loves them. 

And then he disappears for five years to try and figure out who the fuck he is. Jasper. Major. Warmaker. Whitlock. Hale. Cullen.

A bit of all, but not wholly any one. Life was easier when it was only about blood and sex.

.

The first year he mostly hunts down memories, revisits old haunts. Going backwards in time, Forks is his first stop. 

The house looms empty and in town, people ask him what he’s doing back from college, how’s his girlfriend? She’s graduated now, hasn’t she? He nods and smiles and flees.

He finds himself facing Angela on his second day there and she smiles softly because everything about that girl is soft and tells him that Bella left. No-one knows where she went or what she’s doing. She talks to her dad, apparently, but he’s vague and close-mouthed. Good for her, Jasper thinks and ignores the small pang in his chest.

The Midwest then, old houses in forests and deserts, abandoned for fifty years or more. Some show recent signs of living, letting him know that Peter and Char passed this way. He basks in their scent and the warmth they leave behind wherever they go and moves on. 

Texas. Maria has lost much ground in the last decade and is still losing more every day. They say she’s gunning for Houston in a last ditch effort to beat the odds, but he knows she won’t make it. She couldn’t make it a hundred years ago, with both her sisters and him by her side. That, and no-one much cares for her war anymore. It’s anachronistic enough to make even vampires rolls their eyes. 

All of which means he’s safe from her as he haunts his human past through museums and across old battlefields, finding only things he can’t remember, a name in a registry, a jacket, a letter. The small house he was born in has long since been burned to the ground, forgotten forever. He goes looking for children that went missing, Adams and Sophies, but finds none in the old registries. He tries to remember where he plucked them from, but it all blurs. All he knows is that they are alive, by the thrum of their existence in his chest and the rumors, that speak of two shields with Maria. Her personal guard. She can’t treat them too badly if she relies on their shields to keep her alive, can she? 

New Mexico and then Mexico hold more memories in the form of ghost towns and traces of long gone camps. A fire pit here, that used to be the dumps, a few burned foundations of houses, that used to be a town before Maria unleashed him on it, the army at his back.

Not all memories are bad. He finds the town Charlotte was taken from, the rock formation his tent stood beside the first time Peter called him anything other than ‘Major’. He finds a lively little town Maria once took him to, to dance at a festival. They drank plenty during those three days and celebrated hard; she loved the colors and the dancing people. He soaked up the drunk giddiness of a thousand humans and fed it to her and they screwed like bunnies for days, only coming up for blood and more dancing, drunk on humanity itself.

Once he crosses paths with one of her scouts, a bulky and young vampire. He surprises him from behind, brings him to his knees and rips off the head because he can. He burns the body and scratches M.J.W. into the dirt next to the pyre, knowing Maria will recognize the massage. It’s his goodbye to her, his last gift. 

The last death in her name. 

.

He starts hanging in bars after that, sometimes flirting with girls. Once he catches a drunk bastard trying to force himself on a sweet girl named Amy behind the dumpsters in the back alley behind the bar du jour. He kills the man and drains him of every last drop of blood. Later, at his hotel, he finds his eyes red and piercing, staring back at him, asking if this is the path now. 

He shrugs and shakes his head. 

The red dulls to orange in time before fading back to the gold he’s grown used to. This time, there is no shame. This time, there’s not even guilt. Only him, the road and a blind woman’s curse (prophecy).

.

He rarely spends time among his kind because he still has a reputation and he doesn’t want to have to live up to it before he’s figured out just who he wants to be. Sometime though, meetings are inevitable. Some he kills, some he makes conversation with. 

He meets an old guy by the name of Alphonse, who was changed in his late forties, maybe after that. He looks like a grizzled old bear and gossips worse than Alice. Maria got her ass handed to her, just like he predicted. Up north there’s some fighting over territory, nothing big. There’s a girl, a human psychic, apparently, who helps the vampires out.

They call her the Oracle Girl, call her Swan. Alphonse laughs at the name as Jasper stiffens, frowning. Could it…?

He asks why Swan and Alphonse, still laughing, shrugs. “Who knows? Pretty girl like her, hurt in ‘er eyes. She’s a good girl, but something took a piece of her, ey? Swansong, I reckon. Singing her last. Some folks in Cleveland taking bets on who’s gonna turn her.”

“Yeah?”

A nod. “Yeah. My money’s on Carver. Far as I can figure, he’s the first that found her. Got dibs, you know?”

Jasper nods to himself and bids the old man farewell. What are the odds of that girl being Bella? He shrugs the thought off and moves on, gathering more stories about Swan over the next few years, each one convincing him more. 

Swan isn’t Bella. 

.

Except.

Except the day he finally decides to give up wandering and go home, Peter is waiting in the door, greeting him like he always does, with profanity and love and then a scent he never thought he’d smell again hits him and Bella peeks over his brother’s shoulder like she belongs there. 

“Baby girl,” Peter introduces, shit-eating grin on his face as he reaches behind him and spins her to his front, “Meet the Major. Major, meet our very own Swan.”

He’s pretty sure he looks like a log, standing there with his mouth open, staring like an idiot. Bella. Swan. Peter. Charlotte? 

What. The. Fuck?!

“Bella?”

Well, at least Peter looks a bit surprised at that. Apparently the magic eight ball didn’t know they knew each other. “Jasper,” she returns, smile brighter than he remembers.

Then Bella flounces up to him, freely and openly and hugs him like she means it and he’s sort of distracted by her scent and the feel of her against his body and the shock of seeing her at all. He wraps his arms around her and closes his eyes, inhaling her. 

In the background he can hear Peter chortle and regain his footing as he drawls, “See, Char, told ya it’d work out.”

Bella giggles.

.

He spends the first evening pretty much just gawking. At Bella. At Bella having a food fight with Char in the kitchen. At Bella being tucked into bed by Peter. At Bella snuggling between him and Peter on the couch. At Char and Bella giggling over inside jokes. Her feelings are so free, so easy. Love and happiness and joy. Belonging, care, protectiveness, gratitude. Contentment. 

Balm for the soul.

He’s never seen Charlotte so girly. He’s never seen Peter so caring and… fatherly. That is, if your father tends to make crude jokes and grab your ass. Bella laughs and smacks him every time he tries to feel her up but never gets mad. Charlotte pats his arm and says, “Nevermind those two, they’re just playing.”

It’s two in the morning when the human finally drops and once Peter returns from tucking her in like a kid, he sits down, looks Jasper long and hard and then sighs. “Just ask, asshole.”

“She’s the Swan everyone’s talking about, isn’t she?”

Oracle Girl.

It’s not the question Peter expected, he can tell. “Yep.”

“How? The Bella I remember isn’t psychic. She’s a shield.”

Charlotte sits on the arm of his chair, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. “I’m still not over the fact that you two know each other,” she muses. “We’ve been looking for her for a century and you found her before us.”

She pouts and he files the information she just gave him away for later. They looked for her? Why did they never tell him? Why look for her at all?

Peter gets his annoying I-know-and-you-don’t grin and leans back. “Ah, see, Major, Bella is a shield. She’s just not like any other shield you’ve ever met. Her shield isn’t just mental and physical. It’s emotional, too, and proactive.”

He takes a moment to work through that. “You mean…”

Even Char looks smug at this point. Peter nods. “Her shield is so strong that it actually anticipates anything that might pose any kind of threat to her, mental, emotional, physical. And it reacts however it needs to protect her. The first time she suddenly ‘knew’ something about a vampire it probably saved her life or something. She distracted the guy with it and got away. And then the vampires started seeking her out and she always knew what they needed because it kept her safe. She knew because they came and they came because she knew. She’s been getting far fewer hunches since she’s been with us, she says.”

Jasper shakes his head, gob smacked for the n-th time tonight. A proactive shield. A power that actively reacts to what its wielder needs. Oh, the Volturi will be salivating if they ever get wind of her. Not that they’re gonna let them have her.

He frowns at that. He’s making assumptions here. Assumption one, she’ll be a vampire, assumption two, he’ll be around to mean anything to her. Assumption three, she’ll want to stay with them at all. 

What the hell?

Peter’s grin turns smaller, softer, and Charlotte slips down to sit in Jasper’s lap, hugging him around the neck. She is the one who whispers in his ear, “We looked for her for you, Jazz. The four of us, that’s how it’s supposed to be. Family.”

“Whitlocks,” Peter adds and Jasper remembers that quiet tone and gentle smile from a hundred years ago, when his brother would zone out in the middle of a warzone, smiling like a happy fool. 

“She’s what you saw, back then.”

A nod. “Our baby girl. She’s gonna be absolutely kick ass once you’ve changed her.”

He was wrong all along. It didn’t start when Peter opened his eyes for the first time. It started today, when Bella appeared on the porch, happy and grown-up. Free. It started today and he’s sure that it’ll last the rest of his existence because he sure as shit ain’t letting this go.

.

“Baby girl?” He doesn’t know when he adopted his family’s name for her, but it’s pretty much all they call her and it stuck. She’s the baby of this family. 

“Yes?” They’re lying next to each other in the dusty backyard. He’s shining like a beacon in the sunlight and she squints every time she tries to turn her head to look at him. He mostly keeps his gaze on the clouds.

“What happened?” 

She doesn’t ask what he’s talking about. “After my birthday Edward got scared.” She shrugs. “Instead of fighting, he ran away and took the rest of the family with him. I was lost. All I could do was lie in bed and wait to die.”

Sadness pours from her, and remorse, but it’s soft, not piercing. He thinks it’s for lost time and hurt loved ones more than for Edward. He’s glad. “What changed?”

“One day Charlie yelled at me that there was something waiting for me out there and suddenly I knew it was true. I just had to find it.”

“So you hit the road,” he summarizes, remembering his talk with Angela.

“So I hit the road. Just after graduation. Found what I was looking for four years later in a supermarket in New England.” 

“Special offer on potato chips?” he asks, reaching out with one hand to crinkle the empty bag lying next to her. He has to joke about it because the idea that this is meant to be, that they all actually and honest to god _belong_ with each other is a bit too big for him. 

“Family,” she corrects, pushing her sunglasses up her nose with one finger and sitting up to determinedly look at him through the glare of his diamond skin. She looks impossibly cute with her face all scrunched up, trying not to go blind. 

He takes pity on her and grabs his discarded t-shirt, pulling it back on. Her expression relaxes marginally. “And you were late,” she adds, as an afterthought. 

He twists so the reflected rays of light shine directly into her face. 

.

“Come on, Petey, you promised!” Bella wails, waving a fork full of ravioli in his face.

“I said I’d eat yours if you eat mine,” he corrects, his face a mask of disgust. Jasper and Charlotte are leaning next to each other against the kitchen counter, watching the spectacle with amusement.

“I did.” She waves the fork again. Peter is starting to look a bit desperate.

“You licked my finger. That hardly counts.”

“I licked your finger, which, at the time, was covered in coyote blood. Do you have any idea how unsanitary that was? Who knows what I caught off that blood. Now eat the noodle.”

“No.” Trust Peter to revert to toddler-behavior when logic fails. He even crosses his arms over his chest. 

“Your husband is a child,” Jasper observes. Char snorts and nods. They both get indignant glares.

“Cha-Cha?” Bella suddenly asks sweetly.

“Yes, baby B?”

“Would you hold your hubby down for me for a moment?”

Peter never stands a chance.

.

“Do you regret it?”

“Regret what?” she asks sleepily from where she’s perched on his lap, mostly asleep.

“Everything that happened since you moved to Forks.”

“Sometimes maybe,” she allows. “But it needed to happen, you know?”

He thinks about Maria and Alice, about Peter and Charlotte and lights in the dark, about floods and tides and endings and beginnings. He thinks of a boy who died next to a lonely Texan road because he tried to help and the monster that rose from the ashes of three days of burning. Guilt, but never regret.

He thinks about Peter laughing and Charlotte kissing his forehead and Bella hugging him on the front porch and he nods. “I think so,” he agrees.

Bella’s already asleep and Charlotte and Peter melt out of the darkness and play bookends to his filling, bracketing him and the human in his lap. Char leans her head on his shoulder and Peter sinks his hand into Bella’s hair, combing through the long curls with a happy sigh. He’d tease the younger man about it, if he hadn’t been doing the same only minutes earlier. Bella has that effect on people. Balm for the soul. 

“Thank you for finding her,” he whispers, too low for the human to even stir.

Char laughs. “We did it for us as much as you, idiot. We all need her.”

He snorts. That girl is crack to vampires. Everyone wants some. “Then thanks for putting up with me for the past century.” He doesn’t look at either of them when he says it, but he means it. He isn’t the easiest guy to be around and he knows it. 

“At the risk of sounding like a Hallmark greeting card,” Charlotte says, grin audible, “That’s what family does.” Then she draws a breath and tags on, “You grouchy old man.”

They laugh and Peter smacks him on the thigh, earning him a glare from Char for jostling Bella, who’s sitting on top of that thigh. “Man, I’ve been seeing the four of us for a century. There was never any way to ditch you successfully, so stop fucking moping around.”

“I’m not moping.”

“Coulda fooled me.”

“I got done moping when I left the Cullens.”

“And amen to that. They were so wrong for you.”

This time it’s Jasper who smacks Peter. “Thanks for telling me fifty years ago, asshole.”

Peter grins, unrepentant, his teeth glinting in the dark. “All roads lead to the Whitlock clan, little grasshopper, and you’d do good to remember it.”

.

He kisses her for the first time a month after he arrives. He’s ordered for his things to be pulled out of storage all over the country, most of them books, and they’ve been arriving steadily.

Today the last crates got here and together with Peter’s and Charlotte’s collection and Bella’s trunk full of well loved books, they have a whole library packed away in boxes. He could have everything squared away in an hour, but Bella wants to help. Secretly he’s pretty sure she just wants to fondle old books and call dibs on every single one she hasn’t read yet, but he doesn’t say so. 

Peter makes a whipping noise while the girls are out of earshot and then leaves the two to sort through an entire library at human speed. By noon, Bella is covered in dust, her pony tail askew and her eyes alight. She’s reading while she’s working and predictably, she loses her footing on the small ladder she’s using to reach the topmost shelves.

He sees her topple and leaps, catching her an inch from the ground, hauling her against his chest. She laughs and blushes and he realizes just how close they are.

“Jazz?” she asks, light and breathless.

“Yes?”

“Would you just kiss me already?”

He knows how she feels. Of course he does. And he’s made sure she knows exactly how he feels. But it just doesn’t feel like they have to rush. This time she’s not racing against the calendar to be changed. 

“Happy to oblige, ma’am,” he informs her and does.

At the other end of the house, Peter and Charlotte cheer like teenagers. Bella breaks the kiss and breathlessly laughs into his chest, hiding her scarlet face. 

.

“Do you think this is it?” Jasper asks Peter, sitting next to him on the stairs. They’re both waiting for the ladies to get ready for a night on the town, listening to them clattering around the master bathroom.

“This is what?” Peter asks right back, fishing a cigarette out of his shirt pocket and a lighter out of his jeans. He keeps telling Jasper to finally turn Bella already, because Char banned him from smoking when the human is around. 

“It,” Jasper repeats. “Do you think what you’ve been seeing all these years led to this? I mean, is this the goal?”

“Seems like a damn fine goal to me. Happy. Well-fed. Well-sexed. Can’t complain, man.”

“Peter!” Charlotte hisses from above and he looks properly chastised even though she can’t see him. Eventually he drops the expression and lights his smoke, taking a deep drag. 

“Why do you ask?”

Jasper shrugs and takes the cigarette from his brother’s fingers, inhaling once before handing it back. “Seems like an awful lot of trouble for the universe to go to just to make four random people happy.”

Peter shrugs and squirms, never comfortable with discussing his gift. “I don’t know if this is divine intervention. Maybe it’s a paradox. I see what is bound to be and because I see it, it’s bound to be.”

“Like Bella’s hunches.”

“Like Bella’s hunches.”

“What about my hunches?” the girl in question asks, standing at the top of the stairs, looking stunning in a pale green cocktail dress. 

“Do you think there’s more to come for us?”

She smiles, excited suddenly, and claps her hands like a child. The gesture reminds Jasper of Alice but there is no pang in his chest. “Of course,” she laughs. “We’ve got forever and I don’t plan to spend it lying around, doing nothing!”

“Damn straight,” Charlotte agrees as she comes out of the bathroom and Peter quickly squeezes the burning end of his cigarette and slips it into his pocket to lose outside. 

“Time to dance!” Bella announces, still bouncing with excitement. 

Both men stand and Jasper wavers a bit under Peter’s slap to the shoulder. “Careful, man. She’s a horny drunk.”

.

“’M not, y’know?”

“Not what, darlin’?” he asks as he carries Bella towards her (their) bedroom.

“Horny drunk,” she informs him sternly and then ruins it by trying to tap him on the nose and almost taking out an eye. 

“Pity,” he mourns, trying not to smile too widely. He wouldn’t mind a horny drunk right now, seeing as how Charlotte and Peter are already going at it in the kitchen and not bothering to keep their emotions under control.

“No, really,” she tries to sit up and almost manages to launch herself from his arms. “I’m just happy.”

There’s really not all that much he can say after that, is there?

.

“Will you turn me?”

“Are you sure?”

“I was only waiting for you.”

He groans, burying his face in her hair because this is just too good to be true. This is the kind of thing romantic comedies are made of, but not his life. People do not slot together like pieces of a puzzle. Not in the real world. Not in their world. Not people like them. 

But apparently they do. “Where’ve you been all my life, woman?” he asks, pulling her to him.

“Waiting to be born,” she fires back, never missing a beat.

.

He brings death.

Bent over Bella, with her blood singing in his veins and her heart beating rapidly in her chest for the last time, with his venom in her veins and forever ahead of them, he is at peace with that. 

.

.

**Author's Note:**

> Please leave a comment on your way out.
> 
> There is a little timestamp/epilogue here: [bonding scene in pastels](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13022073).

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [bonding scene in pastels](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13022073) by [pprfaith](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith)




End file.
